Another international difference for WIkipediots to get wrong: length of broadcast slots

[eppur si muove]

I'm currently watching a "classic" 1970s television series on BBC's iPlayer. I had a glance at the Wikipedia articles related to the series and noticed that the episodes are described as occupying an hour's timeslot which struck me as odd considering that the episodes last well under an hour. I've checked the archive of BBC schedules and have confirmed that they occupied 50-minute timeslots. Wikipedia also claims that the opening episode was two-hours long when it played for 1 hour 37 minutes when I just watched it.

The Wikipedia edit that inserted the length was made by an IP editor in the US. They assumed that things worked the same way in Britain as in the US. There are no commercials on the BBC though there are a lot of adverts for their own programmes. The first episode occupied a 100 minute slot and the others were in 50 minute slots. The wrong information has been sat there in "always improving" Wikipedia for approximately 15 years.

And, no, I'm not going to say what programme this was. That would make things too easy.

[rnu]

I mean, you strike me as someone who could be hardcore into The Adventures of Black Beauty (T-H-L), but apparently that has only a 25 minute runtime and it isn't a BBC show.