Saturday, November 3, 2012

Daylight Savings Time warnings

Tonight is when most of us in the US turn our clocks back one hour. What it means for television programmers is that their broadcast day today actually has 25 hours instead of the normal 24. It always seems to cause problems, which is in some ways unsurprising when you consider that there's going to be some difficulty getting your recording device to understand which of the 2:30 AMs you mean. (Actually, this is where UTC would be good, although getting the general public to adjust everything by several hours is probably beyond impossible.)

The printable schedule TCM had for November, which was put out well before the programmers decided which shorts they would stick in where, only had 24 hours for today. So, it seemed fairly obvious that TCM was going to have to add some shorts ot the schedule, or else rerun the old piece on letterboxing, which would give us all the heebie-jeebies. The problem is, there still seem to be a few issues with TCM's online schedule for today.

They're showing The Cowboy and the Lady overnight at 1:15 AM, which is before the official time change so it's not a problem. That movie runs 91 minutes, which means it should end at the first 2:45 AM, or actually a few minutes later since Robert Osborne has an intro and an outro to do. The next feature, The Dark Angel, was schedule to begin at 3:00 AM. Since 3:00 AM is when the clocks go back (well, technically I think 2:59:59 is followed by the second 2:00:00), this ought to mean there's over an hour between the end of The Cowboy and the Lady and the start of The Dark Angel. Thankfully, this is where TCM has scheduled a short to make up the time. Specifically, it's the 1944 version of Some of the Best, which is listed on TCM's online schedule as beginning at 2:51 AM, which presumably is just after the outro for The Cowboy and the Lady. The thing is, it only runs 49 minutes, which means there's still a gap of roughly 20 minutes.

The Dark Angel is 106 minutes and is followed by a one-reeler, which together fit well into the two-hour time slot before the final movie of the night, The Lion Has Wings at 5:00 AM.

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