If your priorities are anything LIKE as in order as Lost in Showbiz's, you will have woken this morning with one thought on your mind. What in the name of everything you hold sacred were ITV1 doing screening Rambo 3: the Afghanistan one EIGHT MINUTES BEHIND SCHEDULE last night?
As part of this column's tireless commitment to service journalism - and indeed its tireless commitment to ensuring everyone sees this important picture - I have spent the morning making high level inquiries of ITV's programme planning department. And so: according to a spokeswoman, Ofcom guidelines allow any broadcaster to dick around (I paraphrase slightly) with the start time of any programme by up to four minutes 55 seconds.
So what of the unaccounted-for three minutes and five seconds? The schedule was certainly on schedule when the News at Ten took the baton from The Palace. (My GOD, has anyone SEEN this hilarious schlock-fest? It makes Dynasty's <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=s8ToWMFe-lM&feature=related"
">Moldavian massacre look exquisitely high class.)
The spokeswoman offers some vague suggestions that extraordinary news events might have forced an overrun, but as all those of us who sat through a very pedestrian day's bulletin will contest, this will not stand. Come to that, Rambo 3 is MORE topical than the news. One guy with bad hair wins an entire Afghan war singlehandedly. I DON'T THINK I NEED SPELL OUT THE PARALLELS WITH CURRENT ROYAL STORIES OF NOTE.
I suppose, given that we have been forced to take a guess as to the reasons for this agonising wait, one might hazard that the sluggishness could be partly down to Sir Trevor McDonald, famously responsible for some of the most painfully awful and drawn-out live commentary in broadcasting history, on the occasion of John McCarthy's return from Beirut ("and here comes the plane in an arc... a lovely, lovely arc...."). Yet if it does turn out that a gibbering knight of the realm can't get through the bulletin in time to hand over to a 1988 cinematic classic, then something is badly wrong.
The minute you get into the building, Fincham (if you're not there already), please institute an urgent inquiry into this catastrophic system failure. Then give The Palace a second series. Thanking you.
