[Jon]

Hopefully it comes back with less padding than under Noel- especially once they extended it to an hour!

Talking of blatant padding...
www.youtube.com 

DoND haf a history of blatant padding, but you know you have a problem with the format when you have to leave all the bloopers in because a card fell off or something.  Once they stopped doing the viewer competition when it got caught up in the whole phone in scandal, they'd sort of made a rod for their own back as it were, as it seemed they didn't have any  other filler material, though leaving the screw up in could be their argument of "transparency".

Of course the vast majority of the time things like that didn’t go wrong and they still managed fill the programme. The show was very much shot ‘as live’ with very few re-takes so when they kept those things in they were just showing the progression of the game. The thing is viewers like quite like to see things like that happen and it generated publicity for the show. In many ways the idea of leaving outtakes in has been taken on to some extent by the likes of Millionaire and The Chase.