THE territory's two rival television broadcasters were playing a game of musical chairs last night as they tried to outwit each other in the cut-throat ratings game.
Both were shuffling their programming of the highly popular Taiwanese drama series Pao the Judge (or Justice Pao, as ATV calls it) to either directly clash with or evade the other.
Over the weekend, TVB had decided to switch to the Painting episode shown last night in a deliberate move to clash with ATV's scheduled airing of the same episode.
Realising this, ATV decided only an hour before the programme was to be broadcast to switch episodes themselves and run the Raped Woman episode TVB had substituted over the weekend.
The ongoing tug-of-war between the two stations has aggravated advertisers and audiences.
A Broadcasting Authority Complaints Committee member, Dr Kenneth Leung Wai-yin, said: ''I think this situation is crazy but it is not totally unfair because Hong Kong is a free market and there is now a wide choice of viewing, thanks to the cable and satellite channels.