Pretty Pictures


It’s just possible that someone other than me may be interested in this. It’s a breakdown of UK primetime TV by genre.

Data is from the Independent on Sunday TV guide, sampled as of the week 2-8 April 2006. I’ve defined primetime as 7-10pm Sunday to Saturday and have assigned my own genres as there didn’t seem to be a simple way to get the data from anyone else. It looks like RT have some sort of feed at http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/92.dat, but I didn’t think it worth writing a parser for a one-off analysis. Still, it’d be nice to have this sort of info exportable to CSV direct from the source… some kind of API maybe..?

OK, back now.

Couple of interesting points came out of this.

1) There’s a hell of a lot less Soap than I was expecting (I’m counting The Bill, Holby, and Casualty as drama mind… you could take issue with that.
2) Rumours of the death of primetime comedy have not been exaggerated in the slightest – come on, people, what the hell happened there?
3) Reality and Makeover shows together make up about 7% of primetime. Passed their heyday, or is it just that Big Brother isn’t on at the moment?

Anyhow, if anyone wants to play further, here’s the data.


3 responses to “Pretty Pictures”

  1. The Bill explicitly calls itself a soap – and I’m not going to disagree. (That’s what the billing info calls it, that’s what the production team specifically set out to be when they last changed the format.)

    Casualty was once drama and becomes drama again whenever the BBC wants to praise it but it’s a year-round (or nearasdammit) soap.

  2. Surprised the hell out of me as well. Though if you were to count soap as just being a sub-genre of drama, that’d push docs into second place.

    It’d be interesting to see what the equivalent data from US primetime would look like.

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