Coronavirus | Television News Coverage

Though at the same time probably limits the viewership a bit more as I imagine a fair few people will be watching the England match which will have kicked off at that point.
The government really are like headless chickens as has very much been proven by the last 24 hours - lockdown plans seemingly leaked to the papers rather than announceed by the government and then changing the press conference date from Monday to today and now they can't seem to decide on the time of the press conference.

Certainly with the 6 Nations finale, all the other live sport, Strictly etc today doesn't exactly seem the obvious day to hold a press conference at short notice.

Probably makes it easier for the schedulers in some respects but harder in others if the news conference lasts more than 35 or so minutes or is further delayed. Final Score can easily replace flog it on 2 and Mastermind is a repeat that doesn't really need to be shown so as long as the conference is wrapped up by 17:40 they can simply have the evening and regional news straight after and proceed as planned from 18:05 with the Little Mix (and at a stretch they can probably get away with pushing Littlemix and Strictly back 10 minutes or so as the second half of the Rugby is unlikely to start before 21:10 or even cutting the length of strictly by a similar amount).

So it'll be made perfectly clear by the Prime Minister during his speech and the subsequent Q&A that the measures he's announcing only apply to England will it?

And also because there are (unsubstantiated) rumours going around that the government are considering moving the Corona response effort from the department of health to the home department in order to take control in the whole of the UK which means there is a possibility that the announcement may have an impact on those in Wales and Scotland even if not immediately.

That's a separate matter, and whether he clarifies that or not, doesn't alter what I've stated.

The media need to do their job, and add that clarification if it's absent.

The fact they are doing a press conference on a Saturday pulled forward from Monday suggests to me that this wasn’t a deliberate leak

It's what you get when the Prime Minister and one of the senior members of his cabinet are both Journalists.

The messaging would be very different if our leader had a degree in something useful like a science rather than a dead language.... as Germany has shown

The time given was originally1600UTC, but this changed to 1700. The BBC speculated that this could mean that there were still discussions ongoing.

I bet that the change was actually brought about to have the conference at half-time in ITV's Italy-England game, rather than running into kick-off!

These press conferences never usually start on time anyway, so timing of these are really haphazard.

Well that's just great, Hull only went into Tier 2 today, and now it'll be Tier 4 tomorrow? Why even bother changing regional tiers in the last few days if they were planning a national lockdown anyway?

Final Score has now been moved to BBC 2 at 4.30. There is no updated BBC 1 schedule yet.

Our Prime Minister has neither a degree in a dead language nor a science degree.