I expect I’ve given my opinions on French television before – generally I find it to be no better or worse than UK television. Very often it is probably exactly the same programme (eg dubbed American detective series) or a copy (French versions of reality shows and talent shows). There are a couple of differences that stand out:

- There is less advertising on French TV, to be further reduced in the coming months I understand. This is a good thing.

- Interviews with politicians in France tend to avoid anything that might be seen as a difficult question, so these interviews tend to sound like a party political broadcast, or a cosy chat between friends. This is not a good thing.

But I do have a particular issue with programme scheduling.

We get programmes such as Cold Case, Medium, and a fistful of ‘police’ type programmes most nights of the week on one channel or another.  (I don’t know if the names are the same in other countries – if you don’t recognise the names, it doesn’t matter, they are just routine ’solve a crime’ type programmes).

The programme planners tend to go for overkill, so for example one night you will get three episodes of Cold Case straight one straight after the other, another evening you will get four episodes of Medium etc.

In itself this seems like a curious approach to take, since no normal person would want to see three hours of the same thing in one evening, but there is a further complication. Instead of showing these multiple episodes in the order they were made, they get shuffled about in some random way. So for example the four episodes last week for Medium were something like:

• 9.00pm: series 4 episode 11
• 9.45pm: series 3 episode 5
• 10.30pm series 4 episode 6
• 11.15pm series 2 episode 14

It’s very confusing to be tossed about in time like this – during the course of one evening children get unborn, people lose jobs they are only to get interviewed for later, and angry divorces arrive before the happy weddings that led to them. Perhaps its me getting old but I find chronological order more coherent.

A new programme called Journeyman has just turned up for our amusement, featuring a character who bounces back and forth through time as part of the storyline. I can hardly imagine the challenge of following that story through a bundle of shuffled episodes.