Chris

I think this will be a good move.

The Sunday evening schedule is a lot more stable because there isn’t generally much live or one-off stuff to compete with. The autumn schedule on a Saturday is a nightmare for a drama series trying to build or retain audience because of Strictly, whose show length including start and finish time changes almost every week.

I predict they will pick a time and stick with it, but it’s not obvious to me what they’ll pick. Countryfile has the plum 7pm slot and AFAIK is on year-round. Who is either going to get the slightly-before-6pm slot presently occupied by gameshow repeats, or the 8pm slot occupied by some poor relation of Antiques Roadshow. Those are too early and too late for my taste but we’ll just have to see how it pans out. It’s worth remembering that this season they have ditched the 40 minute, advert friendly format for full hour-long episodes of the kind people using streaming services expect to see. Who has always been in the vanguard of the BBC’s iPlayer strategy and it looks like that’s set to continue, perhaps with BBC Worldwide focusing on streaming sales for international distribution rather than traditional ad-funded broadcast channels.