Tuesday, January 19, 2010

TCM Schedule problems

If you watched A Hatful of Rain last night and stayed tuned for the following movie, Baby Doll, you would have seen several promos and interstitials, two of which conflicted with each other.

First was a Word of Mouth piece on Peter Sellers, which was used as a promo for the movie A Shot in the Dark, which the promo said would be airing at 10:15 PM ET tonight. Later, there was a promo for this month's TCM Guest Programmer, Bob Newhart, who has selected three movies:
Inherit the Wind at 8:00 PM;
Block-Heads at 10:15 PM; and
Sunset Blvd. at 11:15 PM.

You'll note the conflict. A look at TCM's online schedule reveals that A Shot in the Dark will not be airing, with the movie Hot Millions having been added to get everything to time out correctly. This would fit in with what's on my satellite box guide. Whatever rights problems TCM had, however, must have come fairly late. I generally don't download the next month's TCM schedule until late in the last full week of the previous month (with the "full week" starting on a Monday). This means that I haven't downloaded February's schedule yet, and probably won't for another nine or ten days. By the same token, I only downloaded the January schedule early on Christmas morning. Even at that late date, though, A Shot in the Dark was still listed in the schedule.

Apologies to those who were looking forward to Bob Newhart's comments on A Shot in the Dark.

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