TV Viewing Summary W/E 09/02/97

David Jason makes a welcome return to ITV this week with the new series of A Touch Of Frost soaring straight into the top ten with an audience of 16.75 million. ITV drama is continuing to grow in standing, with Frost merely following up the progress which London’s Burning made in its last series. The BBC do seem to be stuck in a rut, with Casualty still remaining as their only real ‘flagship’ drama.

In some sense this could just be attributed to factors other than the actual quality of the drama: neither channels have made any real effort to produce fresh dramas following a new direction and we are constantly seeing the same storylines rehashed week after week. Really then it becomes not so much a question of skillfull programme making, but rather whether or not the audience can find any other attraction to watching the programme. If both the BBC and ITV are following the same stale track why are ITV dramas on the whole performing consistently better? Of course David Jason has recently reconfirmed his popularity with the new, and indeed re run episodes of Only Fools and Horses; it wouldn’t seem too unreasonable to suggest that he is perhaps the main draw, rather than the idea of watching another small-town detective drama. ITV do seem to be providing stronger characters in general across the drama board, and this is perhaps one of the main contributing reasons to their success over the BBC.

ITV’s plans to bring the characters up to scratch in Coronation Street rather than make drastic changes to its planned storyline also seems to reflect this line of thought. Some argue that a cull of some of the more senior characters is long overdue (how Emily Bishop has lasted so long one will never know). The soap does still just have the edge over Eastenders this week with Wednesday night’s episode achieving 17.43 million viewers, although there is little doubt that Eastenders‘ regular audience is certainly still on the increase. Whatever the Coronation Street writers come up with over the next few weeks will be crucial, and if the rumours in the tabloids are anything to go by – it should be good!

Of course this week saw the first ‘winsday’ National Lottery, and the event drew an audience of 10.91 million, around 2.5 million less than the regular audience for the Saturday night draw.

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