TV Viewing Summary W/E 28/02/98

Disgusting, filthy, obscene. I don’t care if Channel 4 screened the programme late, this sort of filth has no place on British screens. But enough about that ‘flea joke’ on last week’s Ally McBeal. C4’s Queer As Folk bounds onto screens with a pretty impressive 2.37 million on its first showing and a further 1.15 million for the Saturday repeat. With all that has been written about the programme in the tabloid press it will be interesting to see whether the rest of the series can match the opening episode’s audience figures.

Over on BBC1, the first episode of the creepy Mrs Merton & Malcolm achieved a combined audience of 9.54 million viewers (7.25 million for Monday’s showing and 2.29 million for Sunday’s repeat). This puts it well ahead of ITV’s recently launched Days Like These, which is struggling to beat BBC2’s Gardener’s World, and was only watched by 4.55 million. The ironic thing about Mrs Merton & Malcolm doing so well is that it is made by ITV heavyweight Granada for the BBC (why?).

Meanwhile, people are departing left, right and centre in Eastenders. Following on from ‘Roof’ last week both Conor and Mary hot tailed it to Scotland in Monday’s and Tuesday’s episodes, which were watched by 14.14 and 15.02 million people.

BBC1’s latest attempt to breathe new life into the tired format that is the National Lottery Draw, has been moderately successful: We’ve Got Your Number sees the Lottery producers scraping the barrel for things to fill the twenty minutes of programming that don’t include the draw; 10.3 million people tuned in to watch the nation’s vice.

Reviewer: Simon Wright