On the one hand I’m always flat­tered when I see a big Ger­man news­pa­per (Süd­deutsche Zeitung in this case) use one of my type­faces. Espe­cially so, when it hap­pens to bring out one of its good char­ac­ter­is­tics, like being very leg­i­ble in small sizes on rather coarse paper, as with FF Unit shown here.

On the other hand I am a lit­tle sur­prised that they would have used the alter­nate cut, the one with the round a and the single-decker g. That may have been delib­er­ate although I don’t think that the round (Futura-)a is par­tic­u­larly leg­i­ble. I do have my doubts about the design­ers’ typo­graphic knowl­edge. When design­ing a table like this (and a TV pro­gramme is just a table) they must have real­ized that FF Unit both in the Type 1 and the Open Type ver­sion not only pro­vides alter­nate char­ac­ters but also a few dif­fer­ent sets of fig­ures. For a timetable like this it would have been much bet­ter to use Tab­u­lar Fig­ures, so that all the hours and min­utes would be posi­tioned neatly under­neath each other. That does not only look neater, it also makes things more com­pa­ra­ble and bet­ter to under­stand in a hurry. The tab­u­lar fig­ures in FF Unit still have slight Old Style char­ac­ter­is­tics, and if that would appear too noisy for some appli­ca­tions, there are Lin­ing Fig­ures as well, also all of equal widths.