"EastEnders" is the most-followed national soap-opera (rivalled only by "Coronation Street"(aka "Corrie"), but that's not on BBC and has a more Northern focus, so I guess Corrie's kettles are less powerful? Who knows). It's aired twice every day except Sunday (when they air all episodes for the whole week in one go). Like every soap, it will end every episode with a carefully-timed emotional cliffhanger. Episodes are filmed well in advance, but edited fairly close to the actual airing date, to avoid too many plot-leaks. Hence, episodes can be slightly longer or slightly shorter, and they usually make up for it by cutting the credits reel (which starts with the famous "tum-tum-tututum" sound you hear in the video); nobody cares about that, of course, so I guess programmers are just guaranteed "at this time there will be credits", which is not enough for the "electricity watcher" because people will fire up their kettles as soon as credits roll.
Cutting short actual EastEnders footage to accomodate some abstract timing issue would result in a lot of angry calls to the BBC!
Also BBC does not have ad breaks so if it is a popular program all the tea making demand takes place at once unlike the more commercial channels which have 4-5 ad breaks per hour.
My guess is that Corrie's kettle effect is similarly powerful, but since it's not a BBC series the BBC chose not to feature it in their documentary...
I'm also a little bit cynical about how the show presented the failure of the French interconnector - I'm inclined to assume that the documentary producers egged up the seriousness of the situation a little bit in order to provide the obligatory reality-TV deadline-drama.
"EastEnders" is the most-followed national soap-opera (rivalled only by "Coronation Street"(aka "Corrie"), but that's not on BBC and has a more Northern focus, so I guess Corrie's kettles are less powerful? Who knows). It's aired twice every day except Sunday (when they air all episodes for the whole week in one go). Like every soap, it will end every episode with a carefully-timed emotional cliffhanger. Episodes are filmed well in advance, but edited fairly close to the actual airing date, to avoid too many plot-leaks. Hence, episodes can be slightly longer or slightly shorter, and they usually make up for it by cutting the credits reel (which starts with the famous "tum-tum-tututum" sound you hear in the video); nobody cares about that, of course, so I guess programmers are just guaranteed "at this time there will be credits", which is not enough for the "electricity watcher" because people will fire up their kettles as soon as credits roll.
Cutting short actual EastEnders footage to accomodate some abstract timing issue would result in a lot of angry calls to the BBC!