Ballet Attention Span.

Dance You may have heard that archival footage of Margot Fonteyn leading in Sleeping Beauty in 1956 thought lost for years has recently resurfaced at the BBC's archive in Perivale. Seemingly in tribute the BBC are having a season of programmes about ballet across BBC's Two and Four, including the presentation of this seminal performance. Except, um, not the whole thing. The BBC press release is very excited about the whole thing, devoting four whole paragraphs to Fonteyn ’59: Sleeping Beauty which is on BBC Four, Friday 7 March, including this crushing disappointment in the final section:

"As part of the BBC Ballet Season, this reworked for television Sleeping Beauty (60 minutes) is believed to be the first time British audiences will have had a chance to see extracts from the ballet including the illusive Act II since the live transmission in 1959. This rarely seen film will give viewers a glimpse of an authentic 1950s style of ballet, transporting viewers back to the living rooms of post-war Britain. The 95-minute reassembled ballet will be available to view online in addition to the 60-minute BBC Four version."

My italics. So having found and having availability of the whole ballet at least in this version in some form, BBC Four have decided their television viewers wouldn't want to watch the whole thing and produced a sixty minute version instead. Yes, the 95 minute version will be online (and hopefully that included the iPlayer app across the various platforms) but at what point and how did the discussion go about deciding that an audience watching television, and the audience watching this programme, would prefer to see this sixty minute presentation instead of the whole thing?