Ashes to Ashes’ viewer numbers still beat Life on Mars’ 2007 début

The Guardian makes it sound like Ashes to Ashes’ second episode was a ratings’ disaster. The headline: ‘Almost 1m viewers desert Ashes to Ashes’.
   That makes 6·1 million viewers in the UK, which admittedly makes the headline true, but it was obviously written by a glass-half-empty type.
   A positive headline would have been ‘Six million watch Ashes to Ashes’ because, when you think about it, six million is still a lot of people.
   In fact, six million is more than what the series première of Life on Mars managed in 2007.
   The desired effect may be to get more viewers deserting the new series if they feel things are looking down. And that will be a sad indictment on us as gullible people, watching what we are told is popular.
   On Friday, at lunch at the Villa Margarita, I asked a young Briton from Leeds what was popular in her home country.
   She replied that Heroes, Lost, Desperate Housewives and other American shows were the must-sees in the UK, just as they are here thanks to heavy promotion and good timeslots. New Zealand programmers will follow their American network counterparts, too, scheduling without regard to local tastes. There are exceptions, such as TV3 with Outrageous Fortune, but a visiting American would feel quite at home here (providing one waits several weeks to numerous months for the episodes to catch up to where the US is). The best American (or British or domestic) shows that have found limited audiences do not make it, or get stuck in bad timeslots. Americans themselves are annoyed at the dumbing-down of their networks, so what they are being fed is hardly something they have asked for.
   Does this suggest a willing globalization in television programming, shutting down local industry in favour of a commoditized broadcast? Will we have more singing and dancing competition shows and reality crap shoved down our throats?
   Few want more reality junk but it is cheap to make. Ashes to Ashes isn’t cheap, with all of its sets, photography and music usage. When in doubt about a bad decision, just follow the money.
   As if to show the power of a headline, Ashes to Ashes may still lose viewers for episode three, thanks to a weak outing last week. Life on Mars wasn’t always perfect, either, and had some off-weeks. But the producers of the new show know what our expectations are like, and I had hoped that things would remain or build on the high that Matthew Graham gave us in the pilot. Last week, things had settled too much and Ashes to Ashes felt uncomfortable in its own skin, with Gene Hunt having fewer great lines.
   Six million one hundred thousand still means that enough Britons think that Ashes to Ashes is among the best shows in the UK, and let’s hope the third episode gets us back to the high of the first, or even that of Life on Mars. I’d hate for the newspapers to think their headlines actually affect us when in reality their circulations are dropping, and for the producers pushing cheap reality and quiz fare to think they can win against properly scripted shows.