Improved Scheduling Leaves Brookside Out In The Cold

For only the third time since the beginning of 1995 only two editions of the tri-weekly Channel 4 soap Brookside have managed to make it into the channel’s Top 10 programmes. For w/e 21/01/96 the Friday edition only achieved an audience of 2.67m -placing it behind all of that week’s editions of Countdown, 70’s rerun Rising Damp, and even behind the Ricki Lake Show, shown at 5pm on a Thursday. (Last week Brookside was knocked off its usual top spot by the factual ‘Cutting Edge’ with its investigation into car crime!).

Both week’s poor performances can be put down to improved scheduling on both ITV and BBC1. For w/e 21/01/96 ITV showed an hour long edition of ‘The Bill’ which attracted 15.3m individuals in its peak quarter hour, whilst BBC1 wheeled out sports fans favourite ‘A Question of Sport’ with a peak quarter hour audience of 5.5m. The previous week ITV showed ‘Eye Spy’ (9.9m) and BBC1 ‘Question of Sport’ (7.0m).

Overall Total TV viewing was down only a couple of minutes on the previous week to 27 hours 40 minutes, with ITV continuing to improve its share of viewing, which for w/e 21/01 stood at 37%, up 1.2% since the beginning of the year.