TELEVISION / Statistics

While A Year in Provence, BBC 1's Sunday night challenge, has been seen off (settling down at 7.38 million compared to 14.37 million for The Darling Buds of May), there remains something of an impasse on Saturdays. Both main channels mix major movies with more staple fare - to similar effect. BBC 1 has six Saturday night programmes in its top 30, as opposed to ITV's two, but this is primarily because of lower viewing figures. Blind Date, on the commercial network, with 12.26 million, and You Rang M'Lord?, at 7.93 million, were the preludes to the evening's main films, which both started at 7pm. Although they attracted similar audiences, the BBC did rather better, in that Three Amigos at 9.39 million brought more viewers to the channel; Cannonball Run II, at 9.58 million, lost ITV most of its early advantage. Birds of a Feather further improved the BBC's position with 10.73 million, which helped the News to 8.48 million and That's Life to 7.63 million. But if the third episode of The Bill is moved from Friday to Saturday, everything will change.

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