Talk:Episode 2093 (22nd April 1981)

I was wondering what the consulted source was for the viewing figure and chart position for this episode (and more generally, for all epsisode pre-mid 1998, when Barb began listing them on its site). I realise that the original compilation source would have been Jictar, but what print source, or online database, was consulted to obtain this fact here? I ask because the book 'Television's Greatest Hits' puts Coronation Street at number one for this week, according to it's chronicological list of number ones, and given the very low audience figure on Monday, according to this site, I'd assume it must have been this episode, which is shown on here as having reached number 2. Now it could perhaps have been a tied top spot, with the source consulted for this site happening to label them as 1. and 2. despite them being tied, but the book usually (though not always) mentions weeks with tied number ones, and particularly does if two different shows tie (as opposed to say both eps of Corrie that week tying with each other), but it doesn't mention a tie in this case. It could also be due a subsequent correction, where the real number one was initially missed entirely by Jictar, and a corrected chart was later issued, and then consulted for this site, but if Jictar or Barb had ever made a big enough error that they not only got the number one wrong, but left it out of the Top 20 entirely, then I would assume that this would have been to some extent newsworthy, and would therefore still be doing the rounds as an anecdote, at least within books and websites about tv viewing or charts, and I'm not aware of this being the case either. Perhaps though it was an error made by the publishers/printsetters of whatever source was consulted for this page?

Of course it's possible that whoever typed the fact into this page made either a research or typing error themselves, but I wouldn't want to assume that, just in case there is an alternative source for tv viewing figures, that got consulted in this instance. For the record the only easily available public sources I'm aware of for viewing figures (pre mid-1998) are two books ('Television's Greatest Hits' and '40 Years Of British Television') and various archive newspapers on the British Newspaper Archive (chiefly, but not only, The Stage). Neither of the books could have supplied the figure in this instance, and there seems no source of the relevant week's chart anywhere on the British Newspaper Archive either. 86.187.163.4 14:01, March 8, 2019 (UTC)