It may be of interest to people to track back through what the controversy over The One was about, since I think sometimes it was a little bit misunderstood.
The One is a show that in French Canada was known as Star Academy, with big success in French Canada, having that on our network. And it has been a huge success for the BBC, for example. The show is essentially a celebration of young talent. You get a bunch of talented young people, you put them together, you train them, and then there's a competition to see who is the most talented. So the idea is to promote talent.
The format for Star Academy has been pursued in countries all over the world--public broadcasters, private broadcasters--very, very successfully. So we had entered into a conversation to do a form of the Canadian Star Academy in English. What happened was, during the course of our concluding this, ABC in the United States decided that they would like to do Star Academy too. We thought, “Well, that's nice; that's interesting.” They were going to do it in a slightly different way. They were going to do it in the summer, and our plan was to do it in the late fall.
So we bought the American show, because we thought buying the American show would do two or three good things for us, one of which is that it would allow us to sort of educate the English Canadian public as to how the format works; secondly, it would provide us an opportunity to learn what they did right and what they did wrong; and thirdly, it would allow us a tremendous opportunity to be able to promote the Canadian show that would be coming out in the fall.
When we bought the show, the only way you could do that as a practical matter was to simultaneously substitute the American show, which would have been sitting on ABC, and overlay our signal onto that. In doing that, we don't control what time the Americans want to put the show on. We don't have control over that. They put the show on, and then we're stuck with taking whatever time they put it on. So that's what happened. Then, unfortunately, ABC, to be perfectly honest with you, made something of a botch of the show, but they also put the show on at a time that forced us to move The National from its traditional time slot. That's more or less what happened.
From our point of view, we obviously don't like moving The National. We don't like moving The National for anything, if we can possibly avoid it. So what we tried to do was make sure that The National was available on Newsworld--so it was available at 9 o'clock on Newsworld, 10 o'clock on Newsworld, and 11 o'clock on the main channel--and then we tried to point people, as effectively as we possibly could, to Newsworld to make sure that nobody would actually miss the show. We actually did, I think, a pretty commendable job, since, interestingly, the numbers for The National on the nights that The One was on were higher than their summer averages. So we think we learned something. That had gone reasonably well.
That said, obviously, when it comes to a show like The National, what you want to do is limit, to the maximum extent you possibly can, moving it around, because it's fundamental to English Canada.