Corsets at dawn as schedules war breaks out on TV

MEDIA & MARKETING:THE PARADISE is an eight-part BBC period drama set in a late 19th-century department store in the north of England. Mr Selfridge, meanwhile, is an eight-part ITV period drama set in an early 20th century London department store.

So far, so similar. So much amazing millinery, so little time. So when the BBC brought forward its scheduling of The Paradise from January to this week – and put it out on a Tuesday rather than the Sunday teatime slot in which it clearly belongs – disgruntled ITV executives harrumphed about spoiler scheduling. News reports dubbed it “Murder on the Shop Floor”.

This is not the first time there have been corsets at dawn between the BBC and ITV. It may have been set two decades later on the brink of a different war, but the BBC’s Upstairs Downstairs revamp suffered in the wake of the more obvious and only slightly more ridiculous charms of Downton Abbey, which got to the screen first. After a while, all those maids’ uniforms start to blur into one.

Thematic coincidences are less common, however, than the straightforward head-to-head scheduling battle, when in a game of commercial brinkmanship, rival broadcasters put out flagship shows in the same slot and divvy up the available viewers between them, sparking reluctant compromises in living rooms across the land.

Witness Gary Lineker – instinctively identifying the real powerhouse in ITV – imploring Simon Cowell via Twitter not to schedule The X Factor on the same night as Sports Personality of the Year.

But my favourite ever BBC-ITV scheduling clash story was way back in 2000 when the much-promoted finale of comedy One Foot in the Grave was scuppered by a leak revealing that the same night’s episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? would feature the first contestant, Judith Keppel, to win the jackpot. The quiz duly took a 48 per cent share, while 36 per cent tuned in to see Victor Meldrew enjoy the blessed release of death.

Well, all’s fair in love, war and the coveted 9pm slot on a Monday.

Twelve years later and regular outbreaks of scheduling tension still occur. This might seem very old-school in an era when 43 per cent of television homes in Ireland have access to a personal video recorder (PVR). But while rates of PVR ownership are up 10 percentage points over the last 12 months, the proportion of viewing that is time-shifted is not as big as dedicated series-linkers might think.

We are still slaves to the whims of channel schedulers: live viewing accounts for 92 per cent of television watched, with time-shifted viewing via PVR and catch-up services stabilising at 8 per cent, according to recent Nielsen figures compiled for TAM Ireland.

And while this breakdown doesn’t take into account the Netflixification of the entertainment market, there is another statistic that bears out broadcasters’ occasional reminders that television still has us by the eyeballs – Irish adults aged 15-plus view an average of three hours and 37 minutes of television every day.

Viewers still want to watch shows as they go out, whether that’s thanks to lifelong habits, the prompter of TV guides, the communal pull of social media bitching or the knowledge that what goes on the PVR sometimes stays on the PVR never to be seen or thought of again.

So when broadcasters use scheduling tricks and tactics to attack each other, it’s viewers who lose out. But there are also plenty of examples of what the BBC’s director general, George Entwistle, calls “sensitive scheduling” in the listings. Indeed, in a recent debate, TV3’s director of programmes, Ben Frow, jokingly thanked his RTÉ counterpart, Steve Carson, for scheduling a worthy education documentary against Dallas – the implication being that this choice had helped swell the soap’s audience that night to a 466,000 average (including a third of available ABC1s).

“I thought that was a good alternative,” replied Carson, somewhat ruefully.

Frow conceded the point. “Seriously, yes, there’s no point going head to head.”

And yet it would be naive to think that spoiler scheduling never happens, or that it’s a tactics-free business. Because most viewers are sophisticated beings, capable of enjoying the grimly highbrow, the amusingly trashy, and everything in between, programmes that come from radically different genres can still create viewing dilemmas. When TV3’s The Apprentice first aired in 2008, for example, it had to contend with RTÉ’s four-part series on former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Plenty of viewers would have wanted to watch both.

As long as we are in thrall to scheduled television, we will continue to have scheduling wars. As for The Paradise, some 5.5 million UK viewers watched its haberdashery-related goings on. My bet is that ITV, despite getting the second bite of the “adventures in vintage retail” cherry, will do better with Mr Selfridge, which after all boasts the allure of Jeremy Piven playing a womaniser in a script by Andrew Davies. The right slot in the schedule might be vital, but making programmes people actually want to watch always helps.