[newsjunkie]

Stepping back to look at editorial again for a moment, the UK optout this afternoon was excruciating - my understanding the 1400 start was to “prove a point” rather than for journalistic reasons, which is why you had poor old Sandford and Easton repeating themselves over and over again before anything actually happened at court.  There was other stuff going on domestically that could have been used as an opportunity to break away - I’m not sure we ever saw Rishi Sunak launching his grooming gang task force outside the 1, and the teacher strike announcement vanished by the time we passed lunchtime.  Clips and packages that had already run once could have been repeated to break up the monotony, but those choices weren’t made.

Starting at 2pm definitely wasn't 'to prove a point.' The sentencing hearing was due to start then, but was delayed because Cashman refused to attend the sentencing and so the whole thing got delayed.

If you had switched over to Sky you would have seen they were in a very similar position (though they only began at 2 after an advert break). I'm not sure they would have done anything different if they had been two split channels. It was painful to watch at times but that happens when covering live events which don't always go exactly as planned.