National Lottery exiled

A piece of news emerged in the last few days that a decade ago would have caused much fury in the press but has caused barely a ripple now. Camelot the organisation that runs the UK National Lottery has agreed a new with the BBC to cover the Saturday night draw, but here comes the part that will raise an eyebrow. The draw will no longer go out on it's traditional Saturday night slot on BBC1 but on the online I-player service. The story is apparently Camelot could not find any one to bid for the draw so they had to go to the BBC as they had first refusal as current rights holder so they paid a bare minimum price and to go the I-player route. To say this marks a bit of a change is the understatement of the year. When it was lunched in 1994 the National Lottery became an obsession with the country with winners of jackpots becoming subject of much media scrutiny. The TV programmes that were broadcast were ratings winners, originally they highlighted were the money was going such as restoring museums, park maintenance etc. But then the National Lottery name became a name to hang an number of game shows on to, the 2 best known examples being Winning Lines originally hosted by Simon Mayo and then later by Phillip Scholfield and Jet Set with Eammon Holmes. But ratings have declined and programmes have dropped out on the BBC1 top 30. Why has this situation came about? Well the market became so overloaded with so much completion with some endorsed by Camelot themselves that the general public has probably lost interest in watching it live and are just catching it up via other mean hence the BBC's I-player decision. This just goes to show if you overload the public with something they give up on it.