Saturday, October 31, 2015

Your friendly Daylight Savings Time reminder

For those of you reading this in North America, tonight is the night that the clocks get turned back one hour at the end of Daylight Savings Time. Now, freaks in places like Arizona and Saskatchewan don't use Daylight Savings Time, so that don't have to adjust their clocks. But even they have to deal with the fact that the TV channels have an extra hour of programming.

TCM never thinks about this when they put out their monthly schedules, as the printable schedule I downloaded at the end of September only has a whole bunch of horror shorts running in two blocks, one allegedly at 2:45 AM followed by one at 3:45 AM. That first block is on after Mark of the Vampire at 1:30 AM, a 61-minute movie in a 75-minute slot. But sure enough, when you go to the online daily schedule page, they've decided to stick The MGM Story in between the two blocks. It always seems to be that or Some of the Best. As always, I find it easier to look at these schedules in terms of UTC/GMT. Mark of the Vampire should be at 0530 UTC, the first block of shorts at 0645, The MGM Story at 0745, and the second block at 0845. Let's hope the online schedule is right and that The MGM Story doesn't end the night, where it would really be more appropriate rather than breaking up TCM Underground. I'd like to record Twice Upon a Time at 4:30 AM and hope to get it all. The box guide is way off, not showing The MGM Story and putting all the shorts in 12-15 minute slots.

FXM did a better job: they've got one of the X-Men movies starting in the first 1:30 AM slot, and running about two and a quarter hours, which takes us through both 2:00 AMs through to the 2:45 AM, after which they'll have one of their FXM Presents pieces (or whatever they call their featurettes), followed by FXM Retro programming at 3:00 AM with The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.

No comments: