It's been a strange sort of year-end for newspaper publication, with bank holidays falling on two weekends and lots of festive features to fit into fewer issues of the T&A.

One of the dilemmas we faced was just how much of the space we could afford to devote to television listings. We normally include the full week's programmes in the Saturday edition as an important service to our readers. But both Christmas Day and New Year's Day, non-publication days, fell on a Saturday.

So we devised a compromise. We put the full Friday, Saturday and Sunday listings in the Christmas Eve T&A, along with a host of previews and features about the programmes to help readers make the most of their holiday viewing.

The rest of the week's programmes, we decided, would have to go on a daily basis - with the Monday programmes included in a special morning edition so that readers would have that day's listings early in the day.

It was a cunning plan but it unfortunately left some readers disappointed - chiefly those who were not able to get hold of a copy of that Monday T&A until later and consequently didn't know what was on the television during the morning and afternoon.

To them - sorry. Our cunning plan wasn't cunning enough to match every eventuality, it seems.

However, this last weekend was rather different. Again, there was no Saturday publication because that was New Year's Day, but we decided to produce a special souvenir Saturday, January 1 edition to include free with our Monday T&A. But that, we decided, was not the right place for the week's listings.

There was also a souvenir Friday T&A to mark the last day of the Millennium, but because Friday was a bank holiday and hardly any newsagents or other outlets planned to open, we published that on Thursday, giving it away free with the Thursday T&A. And inside it we included full TV and radio listings for the weekend and full terrestrial TV programmes for the rest of the week.

Complicated? You bet. You should have been here when it was all being planned. But the upshot was, I reckon, a Thursday newspaper which served its TV viewing readers well.

And with two newspapers and a listings pull-out for the price of one T&A, it probably offered the best value for money of the whole Millennium.

l There was another slight problem with the Christmas Eve TV listings. On a small number of copies the grey tint on which the details of films were printed was so dark that the text was illegible. This happened because the page was initially designed to be in colour but was then switched to black-and-white without the necessary technical adjustments being made.

We soon spotted it, stopped the press and had new plates made including a much paler tint - but not before some copies had been despatched. Our apologies to those readers who were affected.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.