TV Viewing Summary W/E 11/06/95 – Derby Move A Flop

Channel 4’s decision to move the Derby from Wednesday to Saturday looks to be a mistake. Viewing figures for this year’s Derby are down from 4.2m last year to 3.8m this year, this is a fall of 10%. It had been hoped that moving the race from midweek to the weekend would be more viewer friendly.

BBC1s new drama Oliver’s Travels has fared badly against ITV’s prison drama The Governor. Oliver’s Travels only managed to pull in 6.11m viewers compared to 10.34m who watched The Governor. BBC1 did have some sucess with their week long Hospital Watch series; they averaged about 6.4m viewers in their prime time slots.

For the week as a whole television viewing has performed well on last year’s. The average person watched 1 hour and 5 minutes more television this year than for the same week last year, this is an increase of 4.9%. Channel 4 was the terrestrial channel that fared best, gaining an extra 12 minutes (an increase of 8.2%) while BBC2 was the worst, losing 21 minutes (a fall of 13.4%).