Niche Issues – Prime Minister’s Question Time

Being one of those people who maintains a very large media library and harbours a keen interest in politics, it came as a big surprise to me that Prime Minster’s Question Time (PMQ’s) did not have any online sources for episode information or metadata, it didn’t appear on any of the major online TV show indexers. I record episodes to catch up on later and it always irks me to see the blank default icon staring back from the glossy Plex UI with no metadata or information.

So I went hunting to see where EPG or episode information for PMQs was listed… It turns out, virtually nowhere. Almost every TV show ever broadcast has an entry either on IMDB or theTVDB, and the only hint that PMQ’s has ever existed was a long abandonned attempt somebody had made over a decade ago to start listing the episodes in imdb.

Part of the problem is that there is no established naming or numbering convention for PMQ’s. It you take the simplest naming model of one season per Prime Minister then we’d be on Season 13 Episode 73. The 73rd PMQ’s of the 13th Prime Minister since PMQ’s was first broadcast. While it would be manageable for a single term PM, it becomes a lot harder to manage where a Prime Minister is elected for 2 or more terms with episode numbers well into the hundreds. Margaret Thatcher’s last PMQs would have been Season 7 Episode 694.

Clearly it isn’t feasable then to think of PMQ’s as one single continuous entity so the only option is to break it up into more manageable chunks. The most logical way I could find of doing it was to create a new Series for each serving Prime Minister, a new season for each year of their term, and then episodes for each sitting week of the year.

• A unique TV Series for each elected Prime Minister.
• A unique season for each year they are in office.
• An episode for each week that PMQ’s takes place.

To clarify what this would look like for some of Boris Johnson’s time in office:

As you can see, this solves the problem of PMs with long terms running into hundreds of episodes, but still leaves the Year and Season distinctions looking decidedly messy. Thankfully there’s a simple solution. A special ordering system for Daily TV shows was created which creates seasons out of the broadcast year.