TV Viewing Summary W/E 02/07/95

BBC1’s decision to switch The New Adventures of Superman with Steve Wright’s People Show has seen a decline in viewing for both programmes. Steve Wright’s viewing has nearly halved and Superman lost 1.3 million. Saturday, with the exception of the National Lottery, is a bad day for BBC1 with all of its prime-time programmes being out-performed by ITV.

The future of BBC1’s new soap Castles looks bleak, with the news that Charles Denton, head of drama for BBC admitting yesterday that the show is a failure. With an average audience of 3.2m he said ” A piece which sits in the middle of the schedule has obligations to deliver rather fuller levels of audience and enthusiasm than, I’m afraid has happend with Castles”. He was speaking at the launch of the BBC new drama schedule. ITV does not have much to smile about with Wycliffe and Bramwell the only newdrama series appearing in the top thirty programmes list and ex-ITV comedy Men Behaving Badly doing well, at number 15 in the chart, attracting 8.21 million viewers.

TV viewing for the week as a whole has fallen compared to last year again; ITV and BBC1’s drop on last year can probably be attributed to last June’s football World Cup. BBC2 also suffered a fall in total viewing, but still managed to maintain the same share of viewing (this is due to the channel showing the majority share of Wimbledon ’95Average weekly viewing per head for June has fallen by 33 minutes on May. ITV and Channel 4 are the only channels to have increased their montly share of viewing, ITV up from 36.4% to 38.1% and Channel 4 up from 11.1% to 11.4%. Other has remained unchanged from 8.5%.