BBC’s Birds Win Sunday Night Ratings Battle

A repeat showing of the BBC1 comedy series Birds of a Feather has gone into the top thirty programmes list at number nine with an audience of 13.56 million viewers. This, followed by the final episode of Pauline Quirke’s The Sculptress helped to dent the audience of the opening episode of ITV’s new series of Band of Gold which got just 11.28m (compared to an average of 14.8m for each episode of the first series.) All of BBC1’s Sunday night programmes had a bigger audience and share than the ITV programmes they were up against.

The new series of Stars In Their Eyes and Kavanagh QC have both appeared on this week’s programmes list getting 12.84 million and 11.17 million viewers respectively. LWT’s An Audience with Freddie Starr has easily beaten Carlton’s An Evening with Spike Milligan shown last week at the same time, LWT’s programme getting 12.01 million to Carlton’s 7.79 million.

Total TV viewing for the week ending March 3rd 1996 has fallen by 4.1% when compared to the same week last year. Astra Panel home’s best performer this week is Sky Sports, which increases from 1 hour and 21 minutes viewed last week to 1 hour and 34 this week.