24-09-2021, 02:01 PM
Brekkie post_id=41753 time= user_id=976 Wrote:Now I don't think the stations aired much beyond midnight then anyway and only aired limited hours in the daytime anyway, so they probably only lost about an hour a day.
Well, for all that television was quite badly affected, Parkinson moved to Friday at 9pm on BBC2 - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/se...8#at-21.00 - and Whistle Test was on Sunday afternoons. As mentioned, shows like Sportsnight were massively truncated as well (John Conteh would have needed to have got a move on in this fight, the show was 23 minutes long - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/se...3#at-21.55) and indeed the Commonwealth Games were taking place at the time so they didn't get much coverage. And obviously films or dramas lasting more than an hour were compeletely out of the question after nine o'clock.
I've got several Radio Times from this period and that was badly affected for a couple of weeks as well, there were two issues in January which were a single national edition with just 32 pages, so with two pages a day for TV and two for radio, that left just two pages for any other editorial. Good job there wasn't much on to write about.
As mentioned, sport couldn't use floodlights so most matches on a Saturday kicked off at 2pm - https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/se...2#at-14.02
Nick Hornby writes in Fever Pitch about going to see Arsenal play an FA Cup replay in 1972, which because of ongoing power cuts was rescheduled to 2pm on a Wednesday, saying that he skived off school to go and assumed that the crowd would consist of fellow truants and the odd pensioner, but in fact it got Arsenal's highest attendance of the season.