Horizontal stripping? Hammocked chequer-board? Stranding? Confused?
Scheduling. A simple concept, right? Look over all your programmes, fit them into some kind of order and transmit them? Well, it is a bit more complicated than that. For one thing there are all your opponents to consider. Secondly you might have such a threadbare rag-bag of programmes at your disposal that just plonking them down any-how would cause them to sink quicker than Survivor.
This article looks at some of the tricks of the trade to do make the most of what you have got.
A complete patchwork quilt. No common points between different days of the week or even weeks of the year. Never used in such a complete purist fashion since there are general a number of fixed or anchor points such as the news.
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Requires good, strong programming that the audience can catch onto and remember without recourse to programme listings. In this respect it is largely confined to the major terrestrials - and even they have effectively diluted this by introducing a bit of extra order given by regular programmes such as soap operas.
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The point to this form of schedule is to give a little bit of everything so that something will appeal to everyone.
This takes the regular programme concept on a stage. Instead of Programme X being regularly shown ever Wednesday at 19:30 it would be on every day at 19:30, with a possible respite at the weekend. If this is deemed too monotonous programmes of a similar type (e.g. game show, soap, life-style) could be aired at the same time. The former is stripping; the latter stranding.
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This approach is now standard with most minor channels, and majors use it to a large extent outside peak hours, presumably believing that the audience then finds it more difficult to remember individual programmes.
Instead of the horizontal grouping of stripping and stranding, a zoned or themed schedule consists of showing related programmes on a common topic on the same night or segment of a night, generally one at the weekend.
Usually characterised by celebrating a tenuous event with shows built around old clips in the wrong aspect ratio, most of which have already been seen on other theme nights.N |
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Brave experiments with complete theming, such as that tried in the early days of BBC-2 have not been found generally to be successful. The reason is obvious - if the audience isn't interested in the theme you've lost them for the evening.
Does completely away with the concept of programmes, replacing them with a continuous amorphous style stream. Difficult to achieve in practice without including some more fixed features or themes which dilute the concept. Closest attempt to this in television would be the Janet Stree-Porter days of L!ve TV, but it can be found more frequently in radio.
A block schedule is one where a programme or set of programmes is shown repeatedly a number of times in sequence. Example - the Oxford Channel which showed the exactly the same hour-long programme 24 times before replacing it with a new one.
Putting a dud between two audience sucesses. Not so good an idea now when the viewer is likely to just zap over somewhere else.
Too many to mention really. Some have to remain a secret. For now.
