David Jason has taken his mantle of ‘king of the network’ to new heights this week with a Touch of Frost achieving an audience of 18.22 million, an increase of nearly 1.5 million viewers on the previous week’s total. Yorkshire television certainly have a lot to be proud of, very rarely does any programme push either Coronation Street or Eastenders off the top spot and David Jason can certainly regard himself as being at the heart of the TV nation. Having reigned supreme over Christmas with those fantastic final episodes of Only Fools and Horses, he’s now to be gripping the nation with his down to earth, man of the people acting style and cuddly appearance. We rarely seem to exonerate our TV actors to such heights. The soaps have a regular turnover of popular faces but this tends to rely on the intensity of the current storyline in the soap rather than a genuine attraction to either the skills or personality of the actor in question. David Jason though has surpassed this and is now reaching out to the nation on the same heart-felt level we recognise in Morecombe & Wise, or perhaps Desmond Lynam.
It couldn’t really have happened to the BBC at a more worse time. Although in this TV week Casualty picked up slightly with an audience of 14.07 million compared to last week’s 13.60 million, the series is drawing to a close and this means it’s risk time for the BBC as they look to replace their flagship drama over the next few months. Ballykissangel has again made a slight increase on its audience this week but still isn’t quite ‘up there with the rest’ as the BBC might have hoped, achieving an average audience of 10.30 million.
On the soap front it’s the usual story with Eastenders and Coronation Street battling it out at the top. Coronation Street’s Sunday episode is making up rapidly for its rather weak start, this week being seen by 14.07 million viewers, perhaps proving the ITV right in their argument that it would only be a matter of time before regular viewers began to include it as a part of their regular viewing schedule. The continued advertising campaign for Emmerdale also appears to be a success with all three of the soap’s weekly episodes now almost guaranteed a regular place in the top ten.
This week also saw the last episode in the current series of Harry Enfield and friends, not a bad effort, but perhaps on the whole one gear down on the previous. A lot of Harry’s jokes seem to be increasingly worn out, and the really funny guy is actually Paul Whitehouse, now fresh from his success with the Fast Show over on BBC 2. Still, it makes such a change to actually see comedy on the BBC which isn’t a repeat, that we should be grateful for what we get and just be thankful that there seems to be no plans to put the Two Ronnies on twice a week in the same fashion as the current repeated showings of Dads Army!
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