TV Viewing Summary W/E 09/08/98

I hate to say I told you so, but it looks like ITV’s comedy series Duck Patrol is dead in the water. The latest week’s top thirty programmes list shows the show attracting an audience of only 5.93 million viewers, compared to 10.3 million for the first episode in the week ending 19/07/98 (I guess the programme no longer fits the bill with viewers…).

What probably makes it worse for ITV is that neither of its new comedy series can compete with the repeats being shown on BBC1. Babes In The Woods has plummeted out of the list with only 5.88 million people bothering to watch this week’s episode, while on BBC1 repeats of Men Behaving Badly and Fawlty Towers both had larger audiences of 7.91 million and 6.14 million respectively.

Not that I want to put a total downer on things for ITV, but since the week ending 12/07/98 it has been achieving a daily and weekly reach smaller than that of BBC1. This week the respective daily/weekly reaches for ITV and BBC1 were 53.7%/85% and 55.4%/86.5%.

Over on Channel 4 rejoice, for the brilliant American series Ally McBeal makes it into the top ten list for first time since it starting transmitting on Channel 4. The episode in question just creeps into the list with 2.55 million viewers.

On the back of the news that it has achieved a 4% share for the second quarter of 1998 Channel 5’s fortunes appear to be on the up (see C5 Achieves Over 4% Viewing Share For Q2 1998). The station this week manages to keep its weekly share at 5% following on from the 5.8% of last week.

Reviewer: Simon Wright

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