Episodes list pages

Good point, but the fact that there are long-running series shouldn't stop you from doing this, after all most comedy shows and dramas run for a maximum of 13 episodes (for something like Doctor Who) down to a minimum of 6 episodes (for standard comedy show). Even a typical American drama like Lost only has a maximum of 24 episodes per season, which'd easily fit on a page, and would be jolly useful (much more useful than by year)!

As for stuff like the Today show and 'continuing dramas' like Eastenders - I guess you could just paginate them?

Repeat showings should definitely not be displayed twice though - it's confusing! (I know this'd cause problems with the channel logo as shows are sometimes shown on more than one, but still...)

The other problem is lack of data / poor quality data. The data on /programmes takes a circuitous route to the site. On route some data gets lost or mangled so for long running brands eg we don't have episode ordinality data so we can't trace the narrative arc except via broadcast. Even for short series the ordinality data might be missing or just plain wrong.

But we are working on it... honest

What happened to the excellent episode guides on the catalogue beta which has now vanished, what happened to all that data?

@matthew87 - the archive data will be in PIPs and hence /programmes soon. Unfortunately the archive doesn't cover every episode and we need a solution that works for all our programmes - those with ordinality data and those without

PIPs?

Episode guides can be done even for long-running series - split them up either by series (season) or by time (monthly, weekly). Or perhaps make a fancy timeline of some sort that lets you scroll through them.

PIPs stands for programme information platform. It's the database behind both iplayer and /programmes.

Long running series with sub-series are already split this way. But some series (eg Eastenders) don't fit this pattern. In this case these series don't always have ordinality data and the only timing data we have is broadcast - hence the current full broadcast views.
We will add episode guide views where possible

Sorry, a further point. Some of the programme data we have is from repeats from the archive. An example might be reruns of something like Allo Allo. These repeats are often shown out of sync. So you'll get an episode from series 6, then one from series 7, then one from series 5. If we don't have reliable ordinality data the only thing we can go off is broadcast data and since we don't know the actual first broadcast (only the first broadcast since 2007) making an episode guide here might be misleading

Sorry, a further point. Some of the programme data we have is from repeats from the archive. An example might be reruns of something like Allo Allo. These repeats are often shown out of sync. So you'll get an episode from series 6, then one from series 7, then one from series 5. If we don't have reliable ordinality data the only thing we can go off is broadcast data and since we don't know the actual first broadcast (only the first broadcast since 2007) making an episode guide here might be misleading

Good point, but then this would be a good example of where users could help manually re-arrange the episodes into the correct order. Wouldn't be too difficult (especially as many of them have 'episode X' in the title).

Surely the goal of having a page listing series and then episodes, in order, is so obvious and worthwhile that it's worth a bit of effort?

absolutely. but before we can gets users to update programme data we need a concept of users which bbc.co.uk doesn't yet have. There's a whole other project going on to look at /users and personalisation and etc so that should help here

I've just noticed that some programme pages, like this one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00brpck seem to have 'previous / next' links to other episodes in the same series. Does this mean that episode ordering is now (sometimes) available?

And if so, can we add it to the page for the series as a whole?