The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:13am on Sunday, 1st June, 2025:
Rant
BBC news: I realise you're all excited to tell us that there were surprises in the final episode of this season of Dr Who, and I know that you dutifully put spoiler alerts at the top of your reports on TV dramas, but when the headline for the article is itself a spoiler, showing up on your news home page, you've failed.
We recorded Dr Who because it was on while my wife was cooking dinner, and afterwards she wanted to watch the final of Britain's got Talent. We'll watch Dr Who today. However, the BBC news site has already told me what's going to happen at the end of the episode, so all I'll be watching it for is to find out how we get there.
It's not just the BBC. ITV know that people who watched their show in preference to Dr Who may well have recorded the latter. Nevertheless, they still reported it in the ITV news. This is how my wife found out what happens.
If people haven't seen a TV episode, either they're going to watch it later or they're not interested in it, so why report it? If they have seen it, it isn't news, so why report it?
The BBC leak would have been easily avoidable by a simple change of headline.
This is what happens when reporters think that readers are exactly the same as they are.
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