HD Heads-Up: January 21

Prime will pre-empt Monday’s 7.30 premiere of Fishing Impossible for the 60 Minutes special, Barack Obama – Eight Years In The White House. His interview with Steve Kroft was his last TV interview as President of the United States. In the US, CBS aired it five days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Arguably, Prime should have run it last week, too, but would have been reluctant to pre-empt its new-season premiere week …

Incidentally, if you missed the season and series debuts, Prime is peppering its late-night schedule with same-week re-runs. Scorpion will screen again on Saturdays, Bull on Sundays, Madame Secretary on Wednesdays, NCIS: New Orleans on Thursdays, and MacGyver on Fridays. This pay TV-style strategy will push back The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon to around midnight on those weeknights…

Sky TV issued a press release last week publicising its extensive inauguration coverage on its four news services. Of course, none of it was in HD — giving subscribers yet another reason to ‘cut the cord’ when the event was easy to stream in HD from other sources. The difference between ABC’s HD stream and Sky’s shabby SD news feeds was a dramatic as the contrast between Trump and his predecessor …

Sky will add more SD insult to injury by introducing a Prime Plus 1 channel (514) on its platform and Freeview’s satellite service from February 1. It will take up more bandwidth space that could be reserved for an HD channel without adding value to Sky’s service. Moreover, Sky appears no closer to offering Prime in HD on the Freeview|HD platform …

From this week, TV3 is replacing 7.00 Thursday re-runs of Territory Cops with The Best of Jono and Ben, as a curtain raiser to the new season that will air Thursday nights from March …

Homeland will have its season six run interrupted on February 6. It won’t screen that weekend in the US because of the Super Bowl, so SoHo is replacing it with the premiere of Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing (which itself was pre-empted earlier this month by the Debbie Reynolds-Carrie Fisher documentary, Bright Lights). Episode four of Homeland will now screen February 13 …

Guesting this week on Prime’s Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon are: James Spader, JoAnna Garcia Swisher and Kevin Delany (midnight Monday); Cate Blanchett, Hugh Dancy and Cobi (10.40 Tuesday); Mike Myers, Tim Ferriss, and Steve Aoki and Louis Tomlinson (11.50 Wednesday); Glenn Close, Jay Baruchel and Candice Thompson (11.30 Thursday) …