Saturday 14th July 2007

The battle of the Saturday Light Entertainment shows swung back into action with the second of three editions of ITV1’s Sing It Back: Lyric Champion 2007 (6.40pm), which last week ran against coverage of the Live Earth concert. This week it faced the choreographic might of Arlene Phillips and Bruno Tonioli in the first part of the BBC1’s latest talent challenge, DanceX (6.55pm). The 16 dance finalists high-kicked a winner with an audience of 4.8m and a share of 32.3%. This left ITV1 Productions’ Sing It Back with a lowly 1.9m viewers and a 13.3% share, down over a million on the previous week’s audience.

Friday 13th July 2007

Now that the mud has settled on Glastonbury, it is the turn of the annual classical music fest, The Proms, to take centre stage. BBC2 hosted the First Night of the Proms at 20:00, with a rousing lineup that included pieces by Walton and Elgar originally premiered at The Proms, before the festival’s first ever performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Choral, a year late because of a fire at the Royal Albert Hall that forced its cancellation in 2006. The 150-minute programme attracted an average audience of 1.2m music-lovers and a 5.9% share, an improvement on last year’s First Night… figures of 956,000, and a 5.2% share.

Tuesday 10th July 2007

Ecosse Films’ latest drama for Channel 4 stands out from the crowd. Cape Wrath is a seven-part series about a family starting a new life in protective custody in a ‘suburban paradise’ called Meadowlands. Of course, the early signs are that it’s more dystopia than utopia and nothing is quite as it seems. It’s a change from the usual murder-mystery/blue-light dramas that make up the majority of UK drama output, and it’s a world away from C4’s comedy-dramas such as Shameless and Teachers. It’s also pretty unique to see a UK drama premiere in the US (where it is known as Meadowlands on the Showtime network) before it has been broadcast in its home country. The first episode went out on Channel 4 between 10:00 – 11:40pm (future episodes are 1hr), benefiting from a lead-in of 4.3m courtesy of Big Brother. The episode averaged 1.5m (10.2%).

For more detailed highlights from the week’s television, please go to

http://www.attentional.com/bristolmediablog.php