watchingtv post_id=30630 time= user_id=1243 Wrote:Airport, Animal Hospital, (90's) 2 Point 4 Children I think all went out in the 7pm hour
2 Point 4 Children certainly didn't, it had some adult themes like adultery and 8pm was the very earliest it went out. Animal Hospital was at 8pm, it was big news at the time because it beat The Bill, and Airport was at 8.30 as well (and on Saturday nights for a while). You might have got repeats of it there, but no new episodes.
And of course for eight years, between 1985 and 1993, you had Wogan and then Eldorado at 7pm three nights a week, all year round, and Top of the Pops every Thursday, so there was only 7pm on Tuesdays that was available, and that usually had Holiday for six months of the year, so there were virtually no new shows in that slot.
There were a few shows in that slot in the nineties like Telly Addicts and This Is Your Life, but the latter was moved to after 8pm after a few years and for the last few years before The One Show there was nothing of any value. I've just picked a random week in 2005, the last autumn before The One Show's pilot run and if you go through the 7pm slots here -
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/se...3#at-19.00 - you have three docusoaps (dull ones too), Watchdog and the short-lived Holiday spin-off Departure Lounge. It was a dead slot.
The other reason why there wasn't much of any value at 7pm, certainly from 2000 onwards, is because you had Emmerdale there every night which was pulling in ten million viewers. So the only thing that would have made any difference to BBC1's audience at 7pm would not be anything they did, probably, but a crap revamp of Emmerdale.
With The One Show now, it has probably an audience of about 2-3 million who watch every night out of habit (unless there's a bloody big event on the other side like in the Euros) and another million or two who drop by if Emmerdale isn't on, or a bit boring. That at least gives BBC1 some consistency in that slot, which they didn't have before it started.
Flux post_id=30620 time= user_id=766 Wrote:When the One Show first came to be, I was personally surprised they hadn’t tried a daily magazine style show in the slot earlier. Being brought up with S4C on constantly, we were used to having Heno providing what was essentially a slimmed version of a morning/weekend magazine show in the evening slot and it just always made sense to me that you’d have a show like that at that time. The enduring quality is questionable as it was looking very dated and stilted the last time I watched, but there’s no doubt it’s been a success and definite value for money for S4C over the years, and I’m surprised no other channels tried the formula earlier.
There's a bit about Wogan in Jon Plowman's book, because he produced it for a few years, and he said that within the Beeb there was a bit of a debate about what it would be when it started at 7pm, because Jim Moir in light entertainment wanted it to be stuffed with showbiz, and other people, like Brian Wenham, then Director of Television, wanted it to be a show that reflected the news and made news itself, and the resulting show was a bit of a messy compromise.
But Wogan, like Nationwide before it and now The One Show, had value as being a very regular slab of live telly that could be used for everything. The first 7pm Wogan was a great example, as Michael Grade appeared on it to say the dispute with Thames was over and Dallas was coming back to BBC1. And any other time anyone to do with the Beeb had anything to launch or announce, they'd do it on Wogan, so it would be used to launch Children in Need, Comic Relief, A Song For Europe and the like. On the night in 1986 the Six O'Clock News went off air because of a fire in the studio, Nicholas Witchell went on Wogan that night to explain what went on.
And similarly The One Show is used to make announcements regarding Strictly, Comic Relief, SPOTY and so much else, and they can do obituaries on it, and obviously in the last year it's been hugely valuable from a PSB perspective in terms of health messaging and so on. And the other obvious benefit is that it means there's always a new programme on BBC1 even if the rest of the evening looks a bit threadbare.
