BBC Three relaunches to entice viewers away from Netflix – with diet of repeats

BBC Three is to relaunch its £80million television channel with a schedule of repeats after six years online.

BBC bosses hopes the youth channel will lure an audience of 16 to 34-yearolds away from Netflix and YouTube.

However, its first week of programming is 80 per cent repeats, rising to 100 per cent on the first Friday night.

It will broadcast old episodes of Fleabag, Killing Eve and This Country, all of which are available on iPlayer, and a film – Young Offenders – which was released in 2016 and is currently available to all Netflix subscribers. The channel starts on Tuesday, Feb 1, with a special launch programme, followed by new editions of existing series Eating with My Ex and RuPaul’s Drag Race.

But its second day of broadcast has only 15 minutes of original entertainment, and day four – a Friday night – consists entirely of repeats including eight back-to-back episodes of Angels of the North, a 2019 fly-on-the-wall series set in a Tyneside hair salon.

Saturday night’s line-up begins with two repeat episodes of EastEnders.

New content in week one is restricted to a 15-minute comedy called Lazy Susan, a five-minute sketch show called Laugh Lessons, and two documentaries, one about freestyle skiers and another about the gipsy heritage of one of the contestants made famous on an early series of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Two live matches from the Africa Cup of Nations will also have a place on BBC Three in its opening week.

BBC Three is set to occupy the same channel space as CBBC, beginning each night at 7pm and running until 4am.

The corporation has doubled the channel’s annual budget to £80million, at a time when the budgets for all other channels are being cut and BBC Four has become an “archive” channel.

Announcing BBC Three’s return, Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s chief content officer, said it would deliver “exciting, groundbreaking content”.