The X Factor 2018

How many Iron Man films is there? After doing all the Harry Potter films, yesterday saw Iron Man being shown and next Saturday is Iron Man 2. I wonder if ITV Nightscreen will be shown the following week.

Well that was the idea behind last year's revamp which I still think worked well with the exception of the Prize Fight replacing the Sing Off.


I guess though with Robbie off for 5-6 shows the return to the old format at least means he only misses two performance shows.

Remember that they do have to have some filler in a similar way to strictly & Eurovision to set up the staging for the next act. I believe that the filler has dropped from past years and that most VTs are around 1 minute long. On top of the performances you also have 3-5 minutes of judge debate for each act, cutting out the judges reaction would save quite a bit of time, but then that’s where the controversy has been made in the past.

So er what the hell happened? So many questions here - what caused the technical fault itself, considering the performances turned up clean of the problems soon after? Why weren't these versions put out to transmission instead? Did they play the show live from LH2 down the line to ITV and that's where the issue arose?

But my biggest question is why didn't ITV playout themselves stop a show which wasn't fit for broadcast? This just seems bizarre to me how one of the most well known shows in the country, on series 15, on one of the biggest TV channels went to air like this. And not even live, pre recorded! Very strange.

There's three, but ITV don't have the rights to the third one, which was distributed by Disney instead of Paramount.

Eurovision turns round in 40 seconds usually. Based on that, a 60s VT and then 2mins of post mortem and wrap is more than tolerable, especially as the performances themselves aren't usually that long.

I wonder if a move to Sundays would help If they could speed things up? Get the performances on, then have an interval act on bookended by recaps. Scrap the singoff and whoever is bottom of the vote is toast. Could be all done in 2 hours at absolute worst.

TV entertainment shows generally don’t want to be done as quick as possible. People always say there is loads of filler, but it isn’t filler, it’s part of the show.

I do think next year they should move the whole show to Sundays though, with live shows running up to 9pm, with a variable start time like Dancing on Ice did.

A three hour show would be excessive.

The early episodes of Dance avec les stars in France are over three hours long. As they don't do an It Takes Two show on weekdays, they extend the show to cover the lighter stuff from the week.

Many entertainment shows in France are much longer. Their verson of Bake Off has 2-hour episodes.

It was always assumed that the issue was with getting the programme to ITV as some of the bits that had faulty audio were put online and they were fine.


The fact that it wasn't spotted beforehand would suggest it was played in live from somewhere (either the studio or a post production facility) and the fault was that feed(s)


Presumably they don't whip it off air straight away as they were hoping to resolve the issue, whether that was changing playback server or equipment at the feeding end of that was where it was coming from. Maybe they were worried about the implications of the voting if they took it off.... even though at the end it didn't make a difference. To be honest they probably got more viewers hanging around than they would with a breakdown slide


But it's only TV. Lessons will be learnt and whatever happened almost certainly won't be risked next time

My first guess is that the Playout was as-live from LH2, and that there were circuit issues between LH2 and ITV. Normally you'd expect a main and reserve set-up to mitigate these issues - but if you've already lost one circuit (or had difficulties establishing it) I can see how this could happen.



It's worth remembering that ITV don't handle their own Playout - ITV Playout is handled by Red Bee Media. Third party Playout operations like Red Bee are usually not allowed to take editorial decisions themselves under their Playout contracts, so I guess an ITV person would take the decision about whether to pull a show that has still not quite fallen off-air. It's important to remember that the people who put ITV on-air aren't all ITV staff, and have to work to strict contractual guidelines. They don't have the same latitude as they might have done when they were in-house. I expect there are ITV staff on-site at Red Bee to handle these situations, and refer up if need be. My guess is that they stuck with it in the hope it could be resolved whilst still on-air.