TV Viewing Summary W/E 26/07/98

Babes In The Woods is ITV’s latest attempt at a comedy that it hopes will bring in the viewers. With more hype than the Spice Girls and about the same amount of talent, Babes fizzled its way onto Thursday night. The first episode pulled in an audience of 7.99 million viewers (compared to 8.61 million for a repeat showing of Men Behaving Badly).

Soap land sees things heating up between Sally Webster and Greg Kelly in Coronation Street; over the past few weeks Sally has gone from a prim little housewife to a two-timing vamp. Wednesday’s episode was the most watched programme of the week attracting 15.22 million viewers, with all four editions of the soap taking the top four positions on the top thirty programme chart.

Things were pretty exciting over in Eastenders with the return of Bermuda Triangle victim Gita Kapoor after a six or seven month absence (who can remember?). This episode was the most watched BBC programme of the week attracting 12.69 million people.

While ITV manages to grab sixteen of the top thirty programmes this week, its average hours and minutes is only slightly ahead of BBC1’s. Individuals over the age of four tuned in to ITV for an average of six hours and fourty-six minutes compared to six hours and fourty minutes for BBC1. Channel 4 competes well enough against BBC2, each being watched for an average two hours and thirty-one minutes and two hours and fourty-one minutes respectively.

Strange but true fact, Channel 5 finds itself in the position of having an average weekly reach of 41.1% of the viewing population, when watched on average for an hour and four minutes. This in comparison to one of its chief competitors, Cable and Satellite, reaching 28.5% of the population whilst being watched on average for three hours and twelve minutes.

Reviewer: Simon Wright

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