Turn on, tune in..

Turn on, tune in...

The BARB's viewing figures are a social document in themselves. On the week ending 19 February, a week of consummate dreichness, 86.2% of the population consoled themselves with a dose of television each day, and 42% tuned in to BBC2. The wonderfully deadpan X-Files is now BBC2's top- rater, out-performing Top Gear, although we're talking 6.49m viewers compared to the 18.24m who saw Coronation Street on the Monday. And the domination of the world by satellite seems still to be a bit of a way off. Sky's highest rating programme on all channels, a football match, garnered 850,000 viewers. Big potatoes, indeed, in comparison with the most successful programme on the Family Channel, Wolf to the Slaughter, which managed to capture the attention of 100,000 souls for the minimum timespan of three minutes.