TV Viewing Summary W/E 11/05/97

Wednesday’s Coronation Street saw Jim MacDonald out on his first date since breaking up with Liz, 17.38 million people thought it was a good enough reason to tune in, placing the episode at the top of the thirty in this week’s chart. Nice to see a far more familiar Coronation Street style storyline taking place, and to think at one point it was looking like Weatherfield was becoming a fairly traumatic place to live. Eastenders never lets us down. Jo has finally flipped for good, and been officially diagnosed as schizophrenic which is, in the inquisitive words of Bianca, “really serious innit?”. Well, I guess we will have to wait and see, my hunch is he’ll be right as rain by the summer. In the meantime it’s helping to keep the ratings up with Eastenders achieving an average of 14.74 million viewers over three nights, almost level with Coronation Streets average of 14.91 over four episodes.

There are a lot of new dramas floating around at present from both the ITV and BBC. Touching Evil from Anglia Television saw its second week, rather surprisingly it experienced a significant loss from its viewing total in the previous week dropping from 12.33 to 10.63 million. It still comes in as the second most popular drama of the week after the rather dreary Where The Heart Is (11.36 million), and Robson Green makes his best TV performance to date.

Over on the BBC Jonathan Creek made its first appearance, perhaps initially struggling in the tricky Comic Mystery genre. 9.31 million tuned in and at least it’s good to see Alan Davies making a TV drama appearance, despite his presence being somewhat understated in this instance. The very best of the week’s new drama was of course Sharpe on Wednesday night. Central Television now wrap up the last three of Bernard Cornwall’s historical novels attracting an audience of 9.61 million in this first episode and taking a sizeable chunk of Ballykissangel’s viewers, as the Irish drama slumped to 5.39 million.