Use of 'prescient' ?

[coldlocation]

Watching the trailer for tonight's Alan Partridge, it showed a segment with him tyring to make himself sound relevant as a local radio host and coming over as wholly irrelevant.

Since there were news stories last week about cuts to local radio programming from Heart fm etc. I commented that this seemed 'quite prescient' in light of the cuts news.

DP said this was an icorrect use of prescient and what I really wanted was word like 'zietgiestian' (which he made up!)...your thoughts...

Prescient would imply knowledge before the event. So I'm with your DH on this

...but the Alan Partridge show was written/made etc before the news stories about cuts to local radio....so is that more just coincidental than prescient then?

I quite liked zietgiestian though.....

Dictionary definition from Cambridge:
prescient = knowing or suggesting correctly what will happen in the future

So the makers of Partridge in my view wouldn't need to know about cuts to local radio, just have an inkling that sort of thing was going to happen, in order to seem prescient in showing such a story in their production. But you don't mention that Alan Partridge was talking about cuts to local radio.

Also, I've just realised that the trailer was shown after the news about cuts, although obviously Partridge would have been made some time ago before the news came out.

So I think just having local radio as a setting is not enough for it to be prescient of any story in the news about local radio. I agree with your DH unless you can show more of a specific precursor to the real-life story.

Couldn't you just say that Partridge was being topical?

I’d say that was a coincidence!

You're correct, given that the programme would have been written and filmed months before the news story.

Since we're in Pedants' Corner I'll go the whole pedantic hog and point out that it's Zeitgeist, not zietgiest.

I think prescient was the correct word. AP has correctly anticipated the cuts that were then made.

Except it's not clear that AP was saying anything about the cuts, and the other point is that the cuts were on the news before the AP trailer. If AP is saying something that's already topical that's hardly prescience!