zerosleeps

Dear Australian television broadcasters,

I can only imagine the process of preparing a television show for transmission, but I am almost entirely confident that some time prior to showing a pre-recorded show you know exactly how long - to a precision of seconds - each show lasts.

I am also somewhat confident that you know how long each commercial you plan to transmit runs for.

By using simple arithmetic, it is relatively straightforward to add up all these durations, and determine to a very high degree of accuracy how long each broadcast will last.

Granted there are complications caused by minutes consisting of 60 seconds, and hours being made up of 60 minutes, however these obstacles can be overcome and calculations can be performed which tell you that if The X Factor runs for 98 minutes, and you have sold 20 minutes of commercials, the total length of that broadcast will be one hour and 58 minutes. Add in two minutes of self-promotion, and you have a two hour broadcast.

Armed with this information, you can in turn tell viewers in advance that the show following The X Factor will start exactly two hours after The X Factor begins.

You can see that if we continue this chain, you can quickly and easily create an accurate daily schedule of television goodness.

I do hope that this information will be of some use in the future. Perhaps even one day you’ll be able to eliminate the vast amount of bollocks you seem to put into your viewing schedules at the moment.

Kind regards, Scott.