Scheduling Twists

Whilst looking through the BBC Genome for potential oddities I could get a post out of, I spotted something interesting about their original broadcasts of the deeply disturbing Australian childrens' series Round the Twist...

...And it turns out there's already a perfectly good article about that elsewhere on the Internet. But I can add a couple of things to said perfectly good article going by the Genome.

Firstly: the BBC showed Series 1 in a different order to Australia: episodes 6 & 7 were swapped. (Note that despite episode 7 being nominally Christmas-themed, the series was shown nowhere near to Christmas.)

Secondly: despite the fact that the BBC got to show the first series several months before it aired in Australia (apparently due to concerns over content in its home country), the second series did not arrive on British screens until a year after it had first begun in Australia, and a full three years after the premiere of the first series. (Also note that it appears the Radio Times was initially under the impression there were 12 episodes of that series, and it was listed as such until midway through the series.)

Next up, the thing that probably makes this post worth writing: it appears that the BBC also began airing the third and fourth series (produced some seven and a half years after the second) before they were shown in Australia, albeit with less of a gap than the first one. The first episode of Series 3 aired on CBBC on 10 January 2000, but it did not begin down under until 29 February 2000, and similarly Series 4 began on CBBC on 8 January 2001 and on ABC just over three weeks later, on the 31st. (Episodes 5 & 6 and 7 & 8 also appear to have been swapped in CBBC's run.) No episodes were ever banned (despite CBBC banning no fewer than nine episodes of Goosebumps when they aired it between 1997 and 2001), not even the lint monster episode which was preceded by a content warning whenever it was shown by ABC. (UPDATE: It seems worth noting here that the first episode of the third series, which involves Pete becoming pregnant and giving birth through his mouth, crossed the line so much that it almost got banned completely in Australia, which may be a reason for the delay.)

So, given the show's popularity in the UK: why was the second series the odd one out, and by such a large amount of time?