[Neil Jones]

That was just too long a show!

The 90-minute broadcast slot did indeed make it feel very dragged-out, agreed.

Given that typically about 25% of each programme slot on commercial channels is the ad breaks, I suppose that the defacto episode length must actually be around 67.5 minutes?

I don't recall for sure how long the original BBC One era episodes were back-in-the-day, but I presume that they were in a 1-hour slot (and therefore 58-59 minutes, on the ad-free Beeb)?

First series seems to be a 40 minute slot, and then it became 50 minutes when it ended up on Saturday night. According to Genome it started on a Friday, moved to Saturday, back to Friday, back to Saturday and then ended up on Sunday for its final series.

By the time it had been dumped on Sundays its lead-in was Songs of Praise and it led into Birds of a Feather according to this.