TV Viewing Summary W/E 01/11/98
This week saw a bit of a tour de force for BBC1’s main soap opera Eastenders, when instead of the usual drudge round the various different residents of Albert Square, the script writers decided to focus on just four main characters. Monday’s episode, watched by 14.32 million people, set things in motion when Roy Evans drove off after a misunderstanding between himself and his wife Pat. Tuesday’s episode then carried the baton by featuring just Pat and Peggy Mitchell, who acted like a couple of pubescent teenagers, fighting over Frank Butcher. Tuesday’s proved to the most popular of the three episodes this week and achieved an audience of 15.02 million.
Thursday’s episode rounded things off neatly with Frank chasing after Roy to try and ‘sort things out’. The episode was, by the wonders of some ingenious script writing, supposed to be taking place at exactly the same time as Tuesday’s episode. The highlight of the edition had to be when Frank said to Roy ‘don’t you think that you’re jumping to the wrong conclusions?’, which probably wasn’t the best thing to say as Roy was standing on the top of a multi-story car park getting ready to commit suicide. Anyway this episode had 14.41 million viewers interested in seeing how the week long story was brought to its conclusion.
Despite the novel idea of only concentrating on a few characters, none of these episodes could beat Coronation Street’s least watched episode of the week (Friday’s had 15.52 million viewers). This goes to prove that even when nothing major is going on in the nation’s favourite soap people will tune in regardless. Who knows what the ratings will be like at the end of the month when the show’s resident bookmaker goes to see the great turf accountant in the sky.
ITV’s second soap Emmerdale performs consistantly this week, achieving audiences of over 11.8 million for its three episodes. Over on Channel 4 scouse soap opera Brookside is suffering a bit from not having a major ‘issue of the week’ storyline. Combined first and second showing figures for each of the three episode had the totals around the 4.5 million mark, but when based on a single showing the soap achieves figure of less than 3 million (2.74 million being the most for Wednesday’s episode).
Channel 5 is, as ever, the poor relation when it come to audience figures. The channel’s main soap Family Affairs gets around 1 million viewers for the three showings of each episode or 720,000 for its best single showing episode. The most criminally underrated soap Sunset Beach doesn’t even make it into Channel 5’s top thirty programmes list. If you ever find yourself in on Saturday afternoon, you should tune into C5 to watch the most unbelievable storylines and quite possibly the worst acting in a soap this side of Australia. The best audience figure this soap could muster was 658,000 for repeat of Thursday’s episode in the Saturday omnibus.
Reviewer: Simon Wright
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