Because almost all of it is.
We logged every programme on 32 Freeview channels for 48 days — 41,321 slots between 2 August and 18 September 2026 — and 87.9% of them were repeats. Not “felt like” repeats. Counted.
That figure alone is the sort of thing that gets quoted and then quietly misused, so the rest of this page explains exactly what we measured, where the number is soft, and which channels are doing the heavy lifting. The interesting part is not the average. It is how extreme the tail gets.
What we measured, and what “repeat” means here
The data comes from our own schedule archive: full-day listings for all 32 main Freeview channels, parsed from the Freeview XMLTV feed and stored as structured records rather than scraped text.
A slot is one scheduled broadcast. A title is a programme name with episode and series markers stripped, so Bangers & Cash and Bangers and Cash count as the same show.
A repeat, here, means the same title airing more than once on the same channel inside the 48-day window.
That definition matters, and it is narrower than it sounds:
- It is not first-run versus repeat in the Ofcom sense. The feed does not reliably flag episodes, so a brand-new episode of a returning series counts as a “repeat” of that title the second time the title appears.
- It cannot see outside the window. A film shown once in our sample counts as original even if the channel also ran it in June.
So treat 87.9% as a measure of how often a channel returns to the same programme, not as a claim about original commissioning. Every number below uses that definition.
Teleshopping, closedown and continuity are excluded from the headline. Leave them in and the figure rises to 88.7%; we think that version overstates the case, because a shopping block is not really a programme and counting it as one makes the schedule look more repetitive than it is.
The channels that repeat the most
| Channel | Repeat rate | Distinct programmes | Slots |
|---|---|---|---|
| CBeebies | 97.2% | 99 | 3,557 |
| ITV3 | 97.2% | 26 | 933 |
| Really | 97.2% | 31 | 1,093 |
| That’s TV | 97.0% | 46 | 1,548 |
| More4 | 97.0% | 39 | 1,310 |
| Quest | 96.9% | 39 | 1,257 |
| GREAT! TV | 96.4% | 47 | 1,299 |
| E4 | 95.8% | 68 | 1,602 |
| CBBC | 95.4% | 105 | 2,307 |
| Yesterday | 95.0% | 52 | 1,032 |
Read the “distinct programmes” column rather than the percentage. The rates cluster so tightly at the top that they stop being informative — but the gap between 26 different programmes and 105 is enormous, and it is the number that actually describes what a channel feels like to watch.
ITV3 spent seven weeks on 26 programmes
This is the finding that surprised us.
Over 48 days ITV3 filled 933 slots, and across all of them it drew on 26 different titles. Not 26 a week. Twenty-six in total, for the whole period.
Heartbeat took 138 of those slots on its own — roughly three airings a day, every day, for seven weeks. Classic Coronation Street is the other pillar of the schedule. Between them, two programmes account for a substantial share of everything the channel broadcast.
There is a reasonable defence, and ITV3 would probably make it: the channel is explicitly a nostalgia service. Nobody tunes in expecting new drama. Its audience wants Heartbeat and Midsomer Murders, and giving them Heartbeat three times a day is the product working as designed, not failing.
That defence holds right up until you notice that Really and That’s TV do the same thing with 31 and 46 titles, and that the model has quietly become normal across a large slice of Freeview. Nine of the ten channels above ran fewer than 106 distinct programmes in seven weeks. Six of them ran fewer than 50.
More4 aired Four in a Bed nine times a day
More4 showed Four in a Bed 437 times in 48 days. That averages 9.1 showings a day, from a catalogue of 39 distinct programmes across the whole period.
Widen it to every channel and the format ran 582 times on three of them. It is the single most-scheduled programme on Freeview by some distance, and the list behind it has a similar character:
| Programme | Airings | Channels |
|---|---|---|
| Four in a Bed | 582 | 3 |
| Air Rescue | 518 | 3 |
| The Simpsons | 514 | 2 |
| Come Dine with Me | 433 | 3 |
| A Place in the Sun | 395 | 4 |
| Salvage Hunters | 363 | 2 |
Cheap to license, endlessly stripped, and no episode depends on having seen the last one. That last property is the real reason these formats dominate — you can drop a viewer into any episode of A Place in the Sun and they have missed nothing.
The channels that don’t do this
Worth saying plainly, because the headline number flattens some genuine differences.
Film4 is the least repetitive channel on Freeview at 36.3% — 253 distinct titles across 397 slots. Films are scheduled once or twice rather than stripped, so the arithmetic works differently, but the viewer experience is real: you can watch Film4 all month and rarely see the same thing twice.
Talking Pictures TV comes second at 47.0%, with 577 distinct titles from 1,088 slots — remarkable for a channel running on an archive catalogue. BBC Four is third at 54.4%.
Teleshopping, and the trap in the obvious number
Our first pass at this said Film4 broadcasts 7.4 hours of teleshopping a day, which would have made it the worst offender on Freeview by a distance.
It was wrong, and it is worth explaining why, because anyone re-running this analysis will hit the same wall. Those blocks start around 02:35 and run eight hours. They are overnight closedown — the channel is not broadcasting, and the shopping fills dead air. Nobody is being deprived of programming at 4am.
Split by daypart and the picture inverts:
| Channel | All-day | 6am–midnight |
|---|---|---|
| GREAT! Action | 3.0 h/day | 3.0 h/day |
| 5USA | 4.9 h/day | 2.9 h/day |
| 4seven | 4.1 h/day | 0.0 h/day |
| Film4 | 7.4 h/day | 0.4 h/day |
GREAT! Action is the real answer: three hours a day of shopping inside normal viewing hours, none of it displaced to the overnight. Film4 all but disappears.
Across all 32 channels it comes to roughly 7 hours a day between 6am and midnight — against 53 hours if you count the overnight, which is the number we would have published if we had not looked twice.
Children’s channels are not the story
CBeebies tops the table at 97.2%, and it should be left there.
Pre-school channels repeat deliberately. The audience turns over every couple of years, small children famously want the same thing again, and Hey Duggee 228 times in seven weeks is a scheduling decision aimed at an audience that benefits from it. CBBC’s 105 distinct programmes is the widest range of any channel in the top ten.
Including them in the average is defensible. Leading on them would not be.
So why does it happen?
The economics are not mysterious.
A repeat costs a fraction of a commission, and rights are usually bought as multi-run packages — once a channel has paid for a series, additional airings are close to free. Meanwhile the number of channels grew faster than anyone’s programming budget. Freeview has more than 30 main channels chasing a finite pool of content and, on the smaller ones, advertising revenue that could never fund original production.
There is also a genuine argument on the other side, and it is not just spin: only a fraction of a channel’s potential audience sees any given broadcast. A programme shown once reaches far fewer people than one shown nine times. From the scheduler’s chair, Four in a Bed at 9am and again at 3pm are not the same broadcast reaching the same person twice — they are two different audiences.
Whether nine times a day is still serving that argument, or has passed into simply filling hours, is a judgement the numbers do not make for you.
What this does not show
Three limits, stated plainly:
The window is 48 days. There is no trend here, and we are not claiming one — measuring whether repeats are increasing needs a comparable window from an earlier year, which we do not yet have.
Titles are not episodes. A returning drama’s second episode counts as a repeat of its title under our definition. This inflates the figure for channels running new series and is the main reason we would not push 87.9% as an originality statistic.
Only the 32 main Freeview channels are included. No +1 services, no HD duplicates, no radio.
Method note
Source data is the Freeview XMLTV feed, captured daily and stored as structured programme records. Sample: 41,321 slots, 32 channels, 48 days, 2 August to 18 September 2026. Repeat rates exclude teleshopping, closedown and news continuity; both figures are given above. Shopping hours are split at 6am and midnight for the reasons set out in that section.
If you want to check a specific channel’s schedule against these numbers, every one of them has a daily listings page on this site, and tonight’s full schedule is rebuilt every morning.
Happy to share the underlying figures with anyone who wants to verify or extend this — the contact page reaches us.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of UK TV is repeats?
Across 41,321 programme slots on 32 Freeview channels over 48 days, 87.9% were repeats — a title the same channel had already shown at least once inside the same window. Including teleshopping and continuity the figure is 88.7%. This counts repeated titles, not repeated episodes, so it measures how often a channel returns to the same programme rather than first-run versus repeat in the regulatory sense.
Which UK channel shows the most repeats?
ITV3 is the most concentrated schedule on Freeview. Over 48 days it filled 933 slots with just 26 different programmes, a 97.2% repeat rate, with Heartbeat alone accounting for 138 airings. Really and That’s TV are close behind on 31 and 46 distinct programmes.
Which UK channel shows the fewest repeats?
Film4, by a wide margin. Only 36.3% of its slots were repeats, because a film is normally scheduled once or twice rather than stripped across the week. Talking Pictures TV is second on 47.0% and BBC Four third on 54.4%.
How many times is Four in a Bed on?
More4 aired Four in a Bed 437 times in 48 days — an average of 9.1 showings a day. Counting Channel 4 and 4seven as well, the format ran 582 times across three channels in the same period.
How much teleshopping is on Freeview?
About 7 hours a day in total across all 32 channels between 6am and midnight. The all-day figure looks far worse at 53 hours, but most of that is overnight, when several channels hand their airtime to shopping blocks instead of closing down. GREAT! Action runs the most inside normal viewing hours at 3.0 hours a day, followed by 5USA on 2.9.
Are repeats getting worse?
This study cannot answer that. It measures a single 48-day window in August and September 2026, so it has nothing to compare against. Anyone claiming a trend needs at least two comparable windows, and we would rather publish one number we can stand behind than a direction of travel we cannot.
