On Friday, Challenge did the best thing since they acquired the rights to Knightmare again: the start of a repeat run of Les Dawson Blankety Blank episodes. I honestly – no joke, no exaggeration – count them as some of the best, funniest television ever made.
Sadly, take a look at the video above, taken from the end of the second episode. At 18 seconds in, I’m afraid I made an extraordinary noise.
To Challenge’s credit, they apologised – if only all TV stations would do that when things like this happened. Despite my childish headline, they get huge bonus points for that, and it’s something other channels could learn from. The problem is, it’s not even that unusual for programmes to be ruined in this fashion – and most of the time, there’s not a snifter of an apology.
So, a plea. To all television schedulers in this world – and, indeed, anyone who happens to pass an eye over end credit DVE offsets (they are generally scheduled these days, rather than an operator manually pressing a button) – please, please get this right. There is very little which hurts viewer experience more than misplaced credit shrinking over the final part – the climax – of a show. It absolutely kills it.
