an episode of 24 shows in 45 minutes on the BBC

Which confused me slightly last weekend, when I caught an episode (actually two -- next week's episode was on BBC3 immediately afterwards, as boxer says).

Unfortunately, these days, programme breaks are filled with ersatz commercials promoting other BBC services and programmes

Just to clarify: On the BBC these self-ads only occur in-between programmes. On the other channels, the ads are used (US-style) to break the programme into pieces.

The BBC has recently started showing a small self-ad in between the national and local news, which used to be presented as a single block.

These BBC ads are very slickly-produced -- they're much better than almost every other ad in existence.