Viewers have come to accept that Mark Austen and Fiona Bruce will occasionally lapse into Pip ‘n’ Fern on their respective news bulletins by cross-promoting other programmes on their channels.
ITV does it for Tonight, the BBC for Panorama, Channel 4 for Dispatches (Five is precluded because it doesn’t have any other factual output) and to a certain degree it’s a pretty legitimate way to puff a forthcoming programme that contains a degree of investigative journalism. And, after all, they are only doing something that has been happening in chat shows and magazine formats promoting light entertainment programmes or soaps for decades.
But I was struck by a very clumsy attempt on the otherwise innocuous and ostensibly factual Country File on Sunday morning to puff the BBC’s struggling Sunday evening family entertainment show Merlin.
While it’s acceptable for news programmes to promote factual content and lighter pieces to promote soaps, using a programme for the rural community to show-in the mention of completely unrelated-show seems a bit desperate. What next, The Sky at Night promotes Tittybangbang?
