I don’t understand why there is a news sequence on BBC1 television. They have a news sequence starting at 1pm then 6pm and another one starting at 10pm, but why?
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I mean, there’s a 24 hour, 7 day a week, 365 days a year channel called BBC News. Indeed, the BBC1 News programmes are actually also simulcast on BBC News. Or maybe it’s BBC News being simulcast on BBC1.
But why? What’s the point?
Fair enough if we were talking about, say, ITV‘s News programming (also at 6pm and 10pm, designed to clash with the BBC1 version). There isn’t an ITV News channel (There used to be one years ago), so it makes sense that there’s only one place they can put their version of the news, and that’s on ITV.
The same is true of Channel 4 and Channel 5. They’ve nowhere else to put their news programming.
But with the BBC having a dedicated news channel which I can tune in to any time I like, why the duplication and putting news programming on other channels such as BBC1?
I mean, Sky does this properly.
Sky One does not have news programming. Sky News, like BBC News, is another 24/7/365 rolling news operation. So, there is absolutely no need for Sky to duplicate random hours of its news output onto Sky One (well, to be fair it has news ‘teasers’ giving us a 30 second update so if there’s something we really want to know more about we can flick over to their news channel. That’s maybe what BBC1 should have…ah, yes, it does have those already, as well as the actual news programming).
So why does the BBC do all this duplication?
There are other aspects of BBC scheduling that are a bit mad too, especially when it comes to sporting events.
They split the coverage between BBC1 and BBC2, and shuffle programmes across to opposite channels.
Why?
On the splitting issue, typically the tedious Wimbledon tennis coverage will appear on BBC2 until, say 3pm and then it’ll flip over to BBC1 until, say, 6pm, and then it’ll flip back to BBC2 again.
WTF is that about?
Indeed, the scheduling is such that they allow 10 or 15 minute overlaps when both channels are broadcasting exactly the same output. Wouldn’t it make much more sense just to broadcast the entire event on one channel constantly rather than interrupting it by chopping and changing? (Yes, ideally the BBC should have its own dedicated sports channel so it doesn’t have to constantly interrupt its non-sport schedules. Maybe they could convert BBC4 into a ‘BBC Sports’?)
On the shuffling issue, what they’ll mysteriously do is, say, put a long tedious sport event onto BBC1, and cancel all the scheduled programmes on BBC2 in order to replace them with the programmes that would have been on BBC1 had they not put the sporting event on instead.
Yep, bonkers.
Again, for minimum disruption, and assuming the BBC2 normal schedule has less audience than BBC1 normal schedule, surely they should just cancel the BBC2 scheduled programmes and replace them with the sporting event, leaving BBC1 to broadcast its usual schedule unchanged.
It makes no sense whatsoever to be constantly flipping the programmes over to a different channel for the day, does it? Yet that’s what they do. Why?
It’s almost as if they are stuck in the 1950s era when all they had was one channel onto which they were trying to include a bit of everything. Crazy!
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