[octothorpe]

My guess is that the BBC have at least one repeat run they can use, or need to use, before the rights to the series transfer to Dave, or at least before Dave is able to show it? It's rather cheeky IMO, but yeah it does fill a slot.

BBC2 seem to be having an increasingly tough time to fill their 10pm slots as of late. Monday-Friday this week is all repeats, technically speaking. Detectorists being shown for the first time(?) away from BBC Four, a repeat of Live at the Apollo, GOLD acquisition The Cockfields (just three episodes for its first series, though), and yet another repeat run of Cunk on Britain.

With BBC One nicking comedy Two Doors Down, that's six 10-10:30pm slots they've got to fill somewhere. Might not seem like a high number in the grand scheme of things, but it'll still contribute. It's possible, though, I'm being unfair, and the 10pm slot is more populated with newer stuff at the start of the year and again as we move into autumn, and this is a disproportionately impacted week or time of year to evaluate them. Import Our Flag Means Death earlier in the year helped on Mondays, covering ten weeks' worth of 10pm slots for them, even if by the end nearly all its audience had already gone to iPlayer to binge-watch the lot, its audience by the end smaller than 200,000 in the overnights, and not far off what its very late repeats on Sunday nights were getting.

They have Australian comedy Colin from Accounts coming up, which looks decent from the promos. There's quite a few sitcoms from 'down under' (and I mean both Australia and New Zealand by that) they could probably buy in to fill slots, and they should probably get in before ITVX does, which has picked up three to launch on the platform next month. The only issue with imports from abroad is that many of them won't run to fill the full slot without ads, so you'll end up with having to plug five minutes with those Harry Hill shorts from a couple years ago, which happened recently; and if there is anything decent from abroad, I suspect Sky Comedy has already wolfed it up. (And I'm pretty sure a few of the American acquisitions they used to, or at least could, show, have now migrated onto barely-watched BBC3, though I may be wrong there.) If anything, it was easier for them during the height of the pandemic when Newsnight was shunted to 10:45pm and they could easily, and did so readily, fling QI XL repeats out at 10pm; there's a Sunday night run of the latest series at the moment, which - like the previous series - aired in a pattern of the first half being shown in half-hour form first, and the second shown in extended form first (back-to-back with a 45-minute Apollo, which was rather neat if awkward scheduling).

If they're getting desperate they could always dip further into the archive and re-run Mum or Episodes! Or, if the corporation is becoming unbelievably strapped for cash, and they need a political satire hole to fill, film Radio 4 panel shows and dump them there!