Will Waspe
The BBC Audience Research figures for June came out last weekend, accompanied by the usual publicity statement reading, typically: "The television audience divided its viewing time in June in the ratio of 52 to BBC-tv and 48 to ITV . . . Three BBC programmes drew the highest audiences of the month. . . ."
How different, how very different, you will instantly exclaim, from the homeviewing life portrayed by ITV's own dear ratings — provided by the Joint Industry Committee for Television Advertising Research. Both sides can give a happy explanation of the discrepancies — "the BBC samples people, JICTAR samples households," the former arriving at its figures by personal interviews, the latter by meters attached to receivers. The BBC cross-section covers everybody regardless of whether their sets can get ITV or not. JICTAR can only note that sets are switched on, not whether anyone is looking at them.
How fortunate, I cannot help thinking, that each side has hit upon the sampling method that can be depended upon to bring it out on top. And what a waste of time and money it all is, providing nothing but ego massage for producers on both sides and specious sales-talk for the ad. departments of the commercial companies.
Carry on Carrier
Robert Carrier's restaurant in Islington has been closed this week — officially for kitchen alterations, but it can hardly be fortuitous that these have coincided precisely with the opening week of Carrier's new country dining club at Hintlesham Hall, the Suffolk mansion he bought last October, thus allowing his experienced London staff to rally round for the dressy shindigs for the Suffolk gentry which reach their high point this weekend with a gala party to launch the Hintlesham Festival which the food man 'inherited' with the purchase of the Hall. Not only his restaurant staff have rallied round: the operatic and serious music content of the festival will be enlivened by solo shows by Carrier's showbiz chums such as Georgia Brown and Sandy Wilson.
On the list
The licensees of the eight West End theatres which the Secretary for the Environment has lately added to the statutory list of buildings of special architectural or historic interest may have thereby been given a pleasant sense of security. They should be warned by the experience of the Criterion that this may be illusory. The Criterion is also a ' listed ' theatre, but if the plans for reconstructing Piccadilly, which are eventually approved require its demolition, the list will not save it.
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