The demand for the whole country is ~40 GW on average. That's an 8% increase in 5 min.
"In Pennsylvania 6-5000, Willie asked if the reason the planet was destroyed was nuclear holocaust, but ALF claimed it was because every Melmacian plugged their hairdryers in at the same time. If this theory is true, it must be that the power system of Melmac is linked directly into the core & the energy surge would cause the planet to detonate."
And yes, British TV is pretty different, at least on the main channels. Over-running programmes will push everything else out to start later, rather than simply starting five minutes in.
TV shows - even in the USA - start all over the place, they are absolutely not 'clocklike' at all. So bad even TiVo has a hard time getting it right.
Contrasted against the system in the UK with the BBC where there's not really a local affiliate but a national station. In that case it seems much easier to shift for longer running programs.
ha!
One show, in particular, regularly airs 40 minutes after its specified time. I find countries with TV shows that air exactly when they're supposed to to be almost magical.
In France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, shows air usually very timely... These are the countries Greece is usually compared to. Commercials in Spain and France (that I know of) are heavily regulated and monitored.
This leaves me intrigued about Greek TV.
In Brazil, you can never trust the time of the programmes, when the networks make ads of it's shows they announce not the time, but the show that was before. Like "Watch Avenida Brasil just after the Jornal Nacional".
"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!
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.