BBC2 has it all wrong

Regular readers will know that Monday night is Quiz Night on BBC2. Very entertaining and stimulating it is; our public service broadcaster has a duty to inform, educate and entertain.

Tonight, Quiz Night is cancelled in favour of...bloody football! And not just any old football, it's the mighty clash between...Northern Ireland and Germany. Oh my!

A few points to make here.

1. The BBC has a Northern Ireland channel, as variants of BBC1 and BBC2. Just as viewers in Kent get your local news and weather on BBC South East and we in Cornwall have BBC South West, so the lovely folks in Belfast can get their own stuff. Which could easily show the footy and leave the quizzes for the rest of us.
2. Mastermind, Only Connect and University Challenge regularly pull in one and half (Mastermind) and two (the others) million viewers. Let's be conservative and assume there are all the same people - devotees like me.
3. The population of Northern Ireland is roughly 1.9 million. Let's assume that half them are women and 100,000 are boys below the age of 5, based on recent census data. I'm not being sexist, just making a reasonable assumption that the goodly ladies of Derry have better things to do than watch their awful (FIFA ranked 71st in the world) football team lose to Germany (9th). Take away the 18,000 who will actually go to Windsor Park to watch the game, plus let's say 15% of the men who couldn't care less about football, and you are left with a potential audience of (being generous) around 700,000. 

So how does the BBC justify junking a 2 million Quiz Night audience for 700,000 Northern Irish football fans who could actually watch it on their own local channel?

It makes no sense.

But I will get to watch England's Under 21s play live on YouTube, without missing any quizzes!