Tea (Freesat EPG) fix?

I found that my Freesat EPG (Tea) was becoming more and more erratic, often completely failing to fetch programme information even with multiple retries.

I don’t know if this is some sort of anti-scrape/anti-AI mechanism in the server and/or because I’m connecting from a non-UK IP address, but it was getting annoying.

But there’s this One Weird Trick that makes it magically work again, and that is to fetch the TV guide index page (as a browser would). Which is what Tea now does. If it’s been more than thirty seconds since the index was last fetched, it’ll quietly do that in the background and throw away the response.
But it’s a little more complicated than that, you can’t cheat like that if fetching the main channel list, only the programme lists. Yeah, it’s weird, but with this One Weird Trick in place, Tea now appears to function quite nicely here.

So, if this was an issue that affected you (and, like, why didn’t you tell me!?), please try this version that cheats…

https://heyrick.eu/blog/files/tea_0-19.zip (474.74K)

PS: Note that while this is aimed at Freesat and pilfers from the Freesat EPG on the Freesat site, there is sufficient crossover that it may also be of use to those watching terrestrial Freeview. I wouldn’t know, I live a bit over 300km (a bit over 180 miles) away from the nearest transmitter (Rowridge, IoW). ;)