Channel Four In Numbers II: Ratingsgeddon

Yes, we know we said ‘more tomorrow’, but we’ve been busy laughing in the face of EU Working Hours legislation. Bwa-ha-ha-hangonwe’rebeingexploited.

Anyway, numbers. Our mammoth listing of eleven years of weekly Channel Four viewing charts takes in 11,736 individual broadcasts, which is possibly about the same as the average lifespan of a shirehorse. A few days ago, we looked at the highest rated programmes, but what of those hearty mainstays? The shows that flutter around the top thirties week in, week out, maybe not quite getting mammoth audiences, but always somehow in your peripheral vision, like a moth waving a flag? What of them, eh? The list contains a grand total of 1,964 different shows, and here are the hundred appearing most frequently in each weekly BARB rundown. Just under a shot of Michael Grade looking a bit dishevelled in 1990.

“The annual report shoot is today? Frigging heck, I thought it had been postponed until Wednesday.”

Rank	Programme	Appearances on list	Av. Weekly Pos.
1	Hollyoaks	1824	18.74
2	The Simpsons	1257	17.74
3	Countdown	1213	13.24
4	Deal Or No Deal	1040	11.53
5	Big Brother	836	5.74
6	Brookside	575	5.05
7	Richard And Judy	527	23.52
8	Friends	485	14.34
9	Fifteen-To-One	445	23.44
10	Pet Rescue	442	22.36
11	Paul O'Grady	439	15.85
12	A Place In The Sun	249	18.25
13	V Graham Norton	241	15.92
14	Come Dine With Me	240	16.90
15	Frasier	187	15.68
16	Ricki Lake	183	22.07
17	E.R.	163	14.06
18	Time Team	162	15.05
19	Celebrity Big Brother	120	6.87
20	Will And Grace	115	14.43
21	Desperate Housewives	111	11.67
22	Property Ladder	110	7.67
23	Grand Designs	101	4.26
24	Location, Location, Location	95	7.71
25	Sex And The City	90	13.62
26	Scrapheap Challenge	89	14.37
27	Wife Swap	82	11.91
28	Ally McBeal	79	16.41
29	Relocation, Relocation	76	3.62
30	Eurotrash	73	16.68
31	So Graham Norton	69	13.01
32	10 Years Younger	67	12.19
33	Father Ted	66	18.65
34	Cricket Afternoon	66	19.45
35	Big Brother's Little Brother	66	23.42
36	Shameless	65	9.98
37	T.F.I Friday	63	20.13
38	Without A Trace	56	18.79
39	South Park	55	17.62
40	Cutting Edge	54	15.63
41	Lost	52	8.10
42	No Going Back	49	8.33
43	Ugly Betty	49	14.65
44	How Clean Is Your House?	48	11.71
45	Stargate Sg-1	46	20.17
46	8 Out Of 10 Cats	44	10.89
47	You Are What You Eat	42	8.86
48	Selling Houses	42	9.26
49	Montel Williams Show	41	24.56
50	Supernanny	38	5.55
51	Gordon Ramsay's F Word	38	7.08
52	Dispatches	37	19.27
53	Teachers	36	13.56
54	The Salon	34	24.03
55	How Clean Is Your House	33	7.76
56	Secret History	31	17.74
57	Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares	29	3.72
58	The Secret Millionaire	29	4.90
59	Location/Location	29	13.17
60	It's Me Or The Dog	29	13.69
61	The City Gardener	29	14.34
62	Jamie At Home	29	16.07
63	Home From Home	29	25.38
64	How To Look Good Naked	28	8.79
65	Top Tens	28	20.43
66	My Name Is Earl	27	23.26
67	Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares USA	26	4.85
68	The Osbournes	26	12.42
69	Scrubs	26	19.92
70	Channel 4 News	26	22.50
71	Trigger Happy Tv	24	10.58
72	Smack The Pony	23	17.26
73	Driven	23	24.30
74	The Games	22	13.00
75	Secrets Of The Dead	22	13.91
76	Faking It	22	16.82
77	No Angels	22	20.59
78	Enterprise	22	22.00
79	Nypd Blue	22	23.45
80	Bremner, Bird And Fortune	21	23.24
81	Pet Rescuers	21	24.00
82	Room For Improvement	21	24.19
83	Salvage Squad	20	20.55
84	Supersize Vs Superskinny	19	11.63
85	Battle Stations	19	17.37
86	A Place In Greece	19	19.05
87	Heroes Of Comedy	19	20.21
88	Location, Location, Location Revisited	18	6.39
89	Other People's Houses	18	14.22
90	Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights	18	14.39
91	Max & Paddy's Road To Nowhere	17	16.29
92	Spin City	17	20.35
93	The Friday Night Project	17	21.06
94	Real Gardens	17	21.71
95	Equinox	17	21.88
96	Grand Designs Revisited	16	5.63
97	A Place In France	16	8.13
98	Gok's Fashion Fix	16	11.06
99	Football Stories	16	21.44
100	Stargate S G-1	16	22.19

 

And so, despite taking an average weekly position between 18th and 19th in the charts, and featuring lots of characters from Chester (we’re from Wrexham, it’s a local thing), Hollyoaks is the most ever-present show in the BARB hit parade over the last eleven years. That’s a full 567 broadcasts ahead of The Simpsons in second, despite it being, as far as we’ve been able to tell when seeing any of it, well, a bit shite actually.

Other notables: Countdown pipping Deal Or No Deal into third on the list, but given DOND has only been on air for less than half of the period under consideration, well done Noel. Big Brother and Brookside are the only shows in the top twenty to regularly warrant a place in weekly top tens. Meanwhile, Richard And Judy, Fifteen-To-One, Pet Rescue and Ricky Lake make the list of twentymost perma-hits, despite averaging placings in the lower third of each weekly rundown.

Slightly unsuprisingly, Friends is the most popular non-Simpson comedy, clocking up 485 appearance, most of which are repeats, while Frasier only performs slightly less admirably. In the arena of homegrown sitcommery, Father Ted reigns supreme, notching up 66 appearances in the list. That’s especially impressive given that the figures listed on BARB’s website don’t even start until five weeks after the premiere of the last ever Fr Ted episode, meaning that each appearance in the list is from a repeat showing. Indeed, there were only 25 episodes of Ted ever made, compared to 236 episodes of Friends (many of which were first-run). That means the average Ted episode appears 2.64 times on the list, whereas the average Friends ep makes it there just 2.06 times. This means that Craggy Island is officially better than New York. Sort of. In other US sitcom news, the magnificent My Name Is Earl sits in 66th place, narrowly beating the got-annoying-after-four-series Scrubs, yet the only reward both shows received was a sideways shunt onto E4. Bah.

As for US drama shows, E.R. is king, with Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin But With A Skinny American Woman… sorry, Ally McBeal following closely. Without A Trace performs admirably in 42nd place (just in front of the surely-everyone-hated-it-by-then TFI Friday), but Lost performed very well, putting in 52 appearances from the 49 episodes C4 had the rights to, most of which were premiered on E4. After all, Lost isn’t really a show that lends itself to repeat showings.

As for lifestyle shows, there are sterling performances from Pet Rescue, A Place In The Sun, Come Dine With Me, Time Team, Property Ladder, Grand Designs and Location x3. No idea why most of their advertising is from personal injury lawyers and 21st-century-rag-and-bone-men if they’re that popular.

Anyway, enough of annoyingly successful programmes. Here are a few selections from lower down the list that are sure to infuriate you, if you’ve got any sense. So much so, in fact, you might want to post a screenshot of the following table into one of those ha-ha-larious “demotivational poster” memes marked “when you see it, you’ll shit bricks”. Just after a shot of Michael Grade and a great big cake.

Rank	Programme	Appearances on list	Av. Weekly Pos.
93	The Friday Night Project	17	21.06
136	Bo Selecta!	10	17.80
158	The Kevin Bishop Show	8	17.25
176	The Sunday Night Project	7	20.29
205	Peter Kay's Pheonix Nights	6	22.17
246	Dotcomedy	5	25.20
258	Star Stories	4	8.75
269	The I.T Crowd	4	11.00
299	A Bear's Tail	4	21.25
367	Film: The Net	3	13.67
384	Film: On The Buses	3	16.00
442	Le Show	3	28.00
456	Rude Tube	2	3.50
584	Peep Show	2	16.50
700	Spaced	2	25.50
1793	The Sopranos	1	28.00

 

Interesting for a number of reasons that might want you to think about buying a gun. Spaced clocking in at the 700th position on the list, even though all 14 episodes were first aired in the period under consideration here. Of those 14 episodes, just two made it into the Top Thirty for the weeks of transmission (for the record, w/e 26/9/99, 21st position 2.58m viewers, and w/e 11/3/01, 30th position and 2.37m viewers). Similarly, just two episodes of Peep Show make the weekly thirty (11/8/08, 28th, 1.46m, and 20/9/09, 5th, 2.16m – though that was from the most recent chart we’ve looked at, suggesting more of the current series will be there).

Beating it in the charts: A Bear’s Tail (“Oh no, my tail, which is actually a cock, has popped up for about the billionth week in a row”) appears four times, despite only having a single series, with Bo Selecta!, and its three jokes, appearing ten times. The cocking Friday/Sunday Night Project appear a total of 24 times, even though when they BBC had come up with the Saturday/Friday Night Armistice in the mid/late 90s, it was cancelled before you could say “whore in a helicopter”.

Other good/bad points: The I.T. Crowd being trumped by Star Stories, while Phoenix Nights (and no matter what you think of Peter Kay, the first series was brilliant) is bettered by The Kevin Bishop Show, both by appearances on the chart and average position. Meanwhile, in the world of classic US drama, The Sopranos made it into the Top 30 for a single solitary week, in 28th place.

For comparative purposes, you may also like to note that Peep Show and Spaced, both heralded (with more than a little justification) as modern classics of the sitcom format, have been bettered by well-meaning-but-ultimately-rubbish-Eurotrash-spin-off Le Show (no relation to the ace Harry Shearer show of the same name) and a repeat of the On The Buses film. Now, they aren’t sitcoms, admittedly, but hey, the single series of “grainy RealVideo clips blown up to full screen” internet clip show DotComedy made more appearances in the Channel Four weekly top thirty than both shows combined. The normal rules of logic clearly do not apply here.

Here’s a photo of Adam & Joe to make it all better.

Want to guess how many times The Adam & Joe Show appeared in the weekly Channel Four Top 30? Series three, four and five were in the in the timeframe applicable to it. So go on, guess. If you said “not even once, and yet a showing of Nuns On The Run made it onto there, for fuckity fuck’s sake”, award yourself a correctness point.

Sigh.