The Art of Scheduling Programmes on TV

6 am- 9 am Early Morning

Breakfast TV, news headlines, topical and celebrity interviews, lifestyle tips etc. Current affairs that get people up to speed on what happened globally as they slept.

9 am-4 pm Daytime

Designed for the relatively small audiences (students, the unemployed, housewives and shift workers) watching TV at home during the day. These people may not typically have much income, but advertisers are still interested in them.

• Cheap filler TV as there are a great many hours to be filled - e.g. talk shows, fashion makeovers, old movies,

imported soaps & serials, quiz shows etc.

• Preschool children’s TV. Parents watch this, too.

• Lunchtime news provides a bit of gravitas.

• Shows aired at the prime time earlier in the week may be repeated during the day.

4 pm-7 pm Early Fringe

• children's programmes, aired as they arrive home from school

• early evening soaps, especially those aimed at teens

• pop music (teen audience again)

• cookery programmes

• early evening news bulletins (news lite)

7 pm-11 pm Prime Time, when networks do battle over the audience aged 18-49

• soap operas - consistently popular shows that attract an audience to a channel and hopefully keep them there

for the rest of the evening

• sitcoms