The first week of May saw Thames' This Is Your Life reclaim the top spot after its one week hiatus, on Wednesday 6th May, surprising Irish singer Val Doonican on the 18th hole of South Herts Golf Club.
It stayed there the following week too, on Wednesday 13th May, this time its subject being comedy writer Johnny Speight, in what appears to have been a live edition, something relatively common at the time for the series.
The third week of May saw Eamonn surprise On The Buses actor Reg Varney, but despite one of the nation's favourite comedy actors being the subject of one of the nation's favourite shows, Granada's Coronation Street managed to get more viewers in that week, even though it had just gone to the dogs..... literally! In episode 980, on Monday 18th May the recently returned Irma Ogden had gone on a date with bookie Dave Smith to a dog track, and they win a bet on the dog in trap 2 (even though the location footage clearly shows a different dog win to the one that the script required).
That episode was deemed memorable or interesting enough for Network to include it on the 1970 disc of their Coronation Street boxsets, but it was the other episode that week that actually topped the charts, and by some way too. On Wednesday 20th May, in episode 981, Dave is arranges to take Irma out again, and Rovers landlord Jack Walker bowed to progress and bought a bell to ring last orders, having never previously had one!
The final week of May began with a Bank Holiday Monday, a day when Coronation Street's viewing figures would be traditionally lower than average, and this year was no exception, not least because that day's episode went out against the extremely popular Disney Time, a bank holiday tradition on BBC1. By the next day Granada were out on strike and no more episodes of Corrie would air until the end of June, so with only the largely unwatched Bank Holiday episode, the show was well out of the running for that week's top spot. This Is Your Life also struggled that week, with the last edition of that series, on Wednesday 27th, surprising Harold French, a film director and actor who had not acted in anything of note, and who hadn't directed anything for about 15 years, so was of rather less interest to the audience than the previous few weeks more well-known 'Lifes', which, considering that the only alternative viewing available was Tomorrow's World on BBC1 and a mathematics course called Square Two on BBC2, must presumably mean people were actively switching the set off rather than watch it. So with Thames' flagship series floundering in the final straight for that season's run, and Granada's Coronation Street forced off the air by it's striking technicians something else would have to step up to the top spot. So would the BBC be able to capitalize on the ITV schedules suddenly having more holes than Swiss cheese, or would something else from Thames or the wider (but notably Granada-less) ITV network take the top spot instead, actually it was a bit of both.......
Later on the evening of Wednesday 27th May the ITV network aired the sixth episode in the nine-part third series of Bond-like spy drama Callan, starring Edward Woodward. This series had originally been made by ABC (weekends franchisee in both the North and Midlands regions) in black and white in 1967, before being acquired by Thames after the station was created by the shotgun merger with Associated Redefusion, the London weekdays contractor. This third series was the first to be in colour, and the 6th episode was called 'Act of Kindness' and can be seen below,
The episode no doubt benefited from being up against BBC1's Wednesday play, which that week was called Wind vs Polygamy, which sounds like a story about a flatulent man who wishes to sleep around a bit but is thwarted by said medical discomfort, but is actually about the changing world of Africa, and, somewhat predictably for a 70s TV show featuring non-white actors, starred Rudolph Walker among others. Having not only outdone Rudolph and co, but also outdone both This Is Your Life and Coronation Street, in what was, to be fair, a truly underwhelming week as far as viewing figures went, it looked like Callan would be the outright victor that week, despite its post 9pm timeslot making it at best late primetime, if that. But something was waiting till the last possible night to challenge, and as it turned out, match it. Enter the Sunday Film......
The Sunday Film was a strand used by the BBC to show films on a Sunday, but then you knew that already even if you hadn't heard of the strand before, thanks to the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin nature of the name. The strand was often used to showcase themed seasons of films, focusing on particular genres, actors or directors, and in this week it began a new season of Sunday films, all featuring the actor Kenneth More, beginning on Sunday 31st May with 'Sink The Bismarck!', a war film made in 1960 that was apparently a fairly accurate portrayal of the chasing and sinking of the battleship Bismarck by the Royal Navy during World War 2. Incidentally this was only the second time a feature film had topped the weekly TV charts, and the only previous occasion was in July 1964 when an ITV strike left a hole in the schedules which got filled with the film 'Room At The Top' starring Laurence Harvey, and achieving 8.3m viewing homes (about 18.26m viewers if the 2.2 viewers per home multiplier holds true), not bad for an unscheduled and unadvertised broadcast. Of course by the end of the decade both sides would be regularly paying over the odds for the first broadcast rights to blockbuster films, particularly for bank holidays and the like, and appearances of films at the top of the charts would be more common, but for now they were reserved only for the very rare occasion when a strike had hit the television schedules and the film industry was able to cock a snoot at its increasingly more popular rival industry, and add insult to injury by doing so on their own medium.
So the Sunday Film, Sink the Bismarck! managed, in the 9pm slot on Sunday (about as close to the last possible moment as the BBC could possibly get), to equal the viewing figure Callan had achieved earlier that week, meaning there was a tied top spot that week. With the cosy world of family-oriented soap opera and light entertainment being replaced at the top of the charts by post 9pm spies and war heroes, and with the Granada strike decimating the ITV network's schedules and This Is Your Life on its summer break it looked like all bets were off as far the TV charts for summer 1970 were concerned.
May 1970 Summary
W/C 04/05/1970 This Is Your Life (Val Doonican, Thames Television, Wed 6th May, somewhere between 7.2m and 8.9m)
http://www.bigredbook.info/val_doonican.html
W/C 11/05/1970 This Is Your Life (Johnny Speight, Thames Television, Wed 13th May, somewhere between 7.5m and 8.9m)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rOBjUz7Eso
W/C 18/05/1970 Coronation Street (Episode 981, Granada Television, Wed 20th May 19:30, 7.65m)
http://coronationstreet.wikia.com/wiki/Episode_981_(20th_May_1970)
W/C 25/05/1970 Callan (S3E6 - Act Of Kindness, Thames Television, Wed 27th May, <5.9m)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNMqkPYokJ4
The Sunday Film: Sink The Bismarck! (BBC, Sunday 31st May 21:00, <5.9m)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFWwPYB74ac
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