actually, what strikes me as insane in that summary is that the end of a popular TV show might not occur at a fully predictable time. Barring preemption, I think of TV shows as occuring with clocklike regularity, and even with preemption, it's more common for the interrupted show to make like nothing happened and just air the parts that would have been showing then anyway, than to air over an altered time period. Is british TV so different? Why does the operator need a TV to know when a show will end?
The best example is sporting events. I mentioned half time in the Cup Final in another comment: there's a referee-determined amount of injury time added to each half of the game, then that is subject to the ref (who is, as is required by the job, blind) bothering to check his watch. It's impossible to point to a given five minute window when the game will end.
And yes, British TV is pretty different, at least on the main channels. Over-running programmes will push everything else out to start later, rather than simply starting five minutes in.
TV shows - even in the USA - start all over the place, they are absolutely not 'clocklike' at all. So bad even TiVo has a hard time getting it right.
I think that's partially due to the fact that syndication, national providers selling programs to local affiliates is a larger thing here in the States. Those programs go out at a specific time and often the local stations are just relays and can't time shift things.
Contrasted against the system in the UK with the BBC where there's not really a local affiliate but a national station. In that case it seems much easier to shift for longer running programs.
Both the BBC and ITV are regional, with a core national schedule but lots of opt-outs. Most news broadcasts will be followed by a regional news programme. BBC Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland regularly opt-out of the main schedule to show locally-produced programmes.
"EastEnders" is the most-followed national soap-opera (rivalled only by "Coronation Street"(aka "Corrie"), but that's not on BBC and has a more Northern focus, so I guess Corrie's kettles are less powerful? Who knows). It's aired twice every day except Sunday (when they air all episodes for the whole week in one go). Like every soap, it will end every episode with a carefully-timed emotional cliffhanger. Episodes are filmed well in advance, but edited fairly close to the actual airing date, to avoid too many plot-leaks. Hence, episodes can be slightly longer or slightly shorter, and they usually make up for it by cutting the credits reel (which starts with the famous "tum-tum-tututum" sound you hear in the video); nobody cares about that, of course, so I guess programmers are just guaranteed "at this time there will be credits", which is not enough for the "electricity watcher" because people will fire up their kettles as soon as credits roll.
Cutting short actual EastEnders footage to accomodate some abstract timing issue would result in a lot of angry calls to the BBC!
Also BBC does not have ad breaks so if it is a popular program all the tea making demand takes place at once unlike the more commercial channels which have 4-5 ad breaks per hour.
My guess is that Corrie's kettle effect is similarly powerful, but since it's not a BBC series the BBC chose not to feature it in their documentary...
I'm also a little bit cynical about how the show presented the failure of the French interconnector - I'm inclined to assume that the documentary producers egged up the seriousness of the situation a little bit in order to provide the obligatory reality-TV deadline-drama.
They actually cover this in the video. The operator is given a time when the show is ending but the time is actually incorrect so he has to watch the TV for instances like that.
Perhaps he wants to know when most people will leave? While a show might end at the hour mark, the important bits will end at different locations near the hour mark, and he might need to judge when viewers would be most likely to stop watching?
That doesn't happen in Greece. Shows usually air within five minutes of their specified time, but it's not clock-like by any stretch.
One show, in particular, regularly airs 40 minutes after its specified time. I find countries with TV shows that air exactly when they're supposed to to be almost magical.
Here in Brazil, where Globo is like BBC for its power and popularity we have 3 soap operas at night, the 6-oclock Soap Opera (Novela das 6), the 7-oclock Soap Opera (Novela das 7) and the the 8-oclock Soap Opera (Novela das 8). But in fact, the novela das 8 starts at 9:00 at least. And we have another thing, in the regular season of football, in wednesday start at 9:45, so the soap opera has less time to run.
In Brazil, you can never trust the time of the programmes, when the networks make ads of it's shows they announce not the time, but the show that was before. Like "Watch Avenida Brasil just after the Jornal Nacional".
In France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, shows air usually very timely... These are the countries Greece is usually compared to. Commercials in Spain and France (that I know of) are heavily regulated and monitored.
This has made me think about what happens here in Germany: All the main TV channels start their big show of the night at 20:15 (but I guess due to competition for viewers sometimes a channel will start their show one or two minutes earlier).
Then the main channels will often have ad breaks at the same time (I guess so they don't lose viewers zapping to other programs). This seems like a bad idea given Germany's push for green energy production, but I wonder how could the government or the energy producers persuade the TV companies to spread out their ad breaks?
The problem is not with timing of shows, but with the British obsession with tea combined with the credits of a very popular show. In a million homes there are people (2.4 million?) who are suffering tea withdrawal symptoms and they all turn their kettles on at almost the exact same time.
The Germans I know would probably just get a beer or open a bottle of red wine.
20 years ago in Australia, there used to be a comedy show on the government TV channel (no ads) called the Big Gig. It was a live show, but people claimed it was pre-recorded. So one of the hosts had a TV to show what was on the commercial channels to prove that they were live. Didn't quite work as planned - each of the other channels had advertisments running at the time :)
I have lived in France for 24 years, and TV shows were (in the 1990s and 2000s - not sure these days) routinely late or early by ~5 minutes or more with respect to their planned time. I totally understand why the operator needs to watch live TV to know when the show ends, given that the window of power surge is only 5 min.
I don't think it really bothers anyone here, so they haven't really tried to change it. We have a lot of live shows on all timeslots (morning, mid-day, afternoon, and night), so if each one overruns by a bit, another one must compensate. I think that might be (part of) the reason.
