ITV Programming Thread

Top marks to whoever produced the Morcambe and Wise show on ITV (Shiver?) - all archive material black pillarboxed.

And bonus points for getting a stripey 2 clock continuity announcement on prime time ITV!

Edit: Crook Productions, not Shiver

It was a wonderful production with a good variety of guests for the inserts.

I'd never seen a BBC Two Branded news bulletin before. I'd naïvely thought that it was branded the same as BBC One's bulletins with the exception of newsnight.

This might interest you then. Several News on 2 clips, featuring the second, third and fourth BBC2 logos.
http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/news/bbcnews/bbc2news.html

I know it's a while since the rule was relaxed and we've seen it before (with Take Me Out last year for example) but really do not like seeing the Chasers featuring in the sponsorship bumpers for The Chase. Really does discredit them to an extent IMO and I just can't understand how after decades of enforcing the line between programming and advertising OFCOM ended up doing a complete about turn on it.

It does seem a step too far. Not long ago a star wasn't allowed to feature in an ad break in the middle of their show, now they actively encourage it, and go one step further and use them in the sponsorship as well.

We are almost back to that "Bruce's Play your cards right... With The Sun!" era

It's utterly cringeworthy at worst.

In other Chase news, the first episodes of 2017 go off to an inauspicious start - including the Brain of Britain getting wiped off by the Beast, and yesterday's episode featuring someone who only managed to score £1000, ending up with the lower offer of £0. Comedy gold.

It did seem odd Gala getting them on board and not doing much with them beyond a couple of ads... hopefully it'll be less annoying than the annoying Lloyds Pharmacy sponsorship stings.

Same thing with Bill Hill's sponsorship bumpers of ITV Racing featuring AP McCoy. Just seconds after he was punditing about the last/next race in the coverage, he's looking all moody in the sponsor stings.

I'm not keen on it, must admit and I am surprised that Ofcom threw sixty years of commercial TV tradition out the window for whatever gain this gives to... whoever it benefits. For as long as we've had TV in this country the boundary between programming and advertising has to be clear. Now it's increasingly muddied and the advent of product placement hasn't helped matters either, though that's not as prominent here as it is in other countries.

I would not be surprised if in the future a TV station over here starts doing what I saw on a YouTube clip of an American broadcast, which was starting the next episode of something while the credits of a previous show were still running. That and having hundreds of credits running at breakneck speed where the only chance anybody has of reading them is to Sky+ them.

Not so sure - channels very rarely use the accelerated flow concept as it is, preferring to get an ad break in at the top of the hour. The only way I can see it changing is if OFCOM allow more breaks within the programme but still only 4 breaks within an hour. Digital channels can do this now but very few take advantage - I've only seen 5Star do it.

I think we're at the limit of what we're prepared to tolerate advert wise, after all the American system eats up the best part of at least twenty minutes of adverts for every "hour long" programme scheduled, and are sprinkled liberally throughout the programme.

I wouldn't be completely against a tweak so it's still 4 breaks an hour but they can show them all within shows, so half-hour programmes could have two breaks, but then flow straight into the next programme. That might encourage a return of 30-minute shows to the commercial networks rather than everything being dragged out to an hour.

That said it is notable the one thing that hasn't changed pretty much since the launch of UK television is the number of breaks within half hour shows, despite changes to shows of longer lengths. I think they got away with adding an extra break to hour-long shows around 2001 but the later changes to shows longer than 70 minutes and the scrapping of the "20-minute rule" was a step too far and is particularly notable on things shows The X Factor and anything 90 minutes or longer really.