Recently, I was watching an interview with the delightful Alex Horne of Taskmaster fame, discussing the issues he had with trying to bring the show over to the U.S. Most of it was as expected, but one off-hand remark caught me off-guard. He mentioned that compressing the show to a half-hour was even harder with how many commercials the U.S. airs. My reaction was to tilt my head like a dog watching its owner try a new hobby, followed by a furrowed brow and growing anger.
I realize there’s rampant amounts of American ignorance, and an assumption that the rest of the world does things the way we do. For whatever reason, though, I thought the ratio of entertainment-to-ads was a universal handshake made by any and all television industries — simply the way things were, the pound of flesh we pay to watch Abbott Elementary. But you’re telling me that across the pond, they’re getting more TV per hour? Denser, richer television, the likes of which we could only dream of?
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Apparently so. How many ads air during television programs in the U.K. depend on the network, but even the networks with the most free reign still come in well under the amount of soda, life insurance and sports utility vehicles we’re forced to learn about here in the States. You probably have an idea just from the rough runtimes on ad-free viewing, but the general ratio in the U.S. is 15 minutes of ads per hour — a full one-fourth of your precious free time.
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In the U.K., ad quantity is controlled by Ofcom, or the Office of Communications. Its official limit for private networks is 12 minutes per hour, which seems like a small difference, but when you realize that in America that would be one less commercial break entirely, it does sting. Not to mention, that given how much TV most of us watch, that time adds up quickly.
Of course, public networks? Those put us to absolute shame. Networks like ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and all subsidiaries, are limited to only seven minutes of advertising per hour. That’s a blissfully large block of pure content. As for BBC itself? It’s entirely commercial-free. It’s almost enough to make calling “spaghetti bolognese” the disgusting abbreviation “spag bol” worth it.
And if you’re going, “Everyone has ad-free streaming now, so who cares about terrestrial commercials anymore?” Even if you’re not seeing the ads, you’re still getting less show. Like the aforementioned Abbott Elementary, whether you actually have to watch the ads or not, the space has been made. Ship it over to foggy London, and you’d be getting a couple more minutes per week.