TV Drama in Broadcaster's Schedules

To get some idea of how important the genre of TV drama is to broadcasters, do a quick bit of research.

Go to the BARB website. BARB is the Broadcasters Audience Research Board, and it compiles charts and statistics of what people watch on TV.

Go to the “Top 10s”
From the alphabetic list of all available channels, select BBC1, and click on the “View Figures” button at the bottom.
Now examine the list of the top 10 programmes watched on this channel. How many of them would you classify as drama?
Now repeat this exercise for BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5. You may want to do this in a group to save time.
What percentage of the top-rated television programmes on terrestrial television are drama?
Does any one particular sub-genre dominate the ratings?
What conclusions can you draw about the importance of TV Drama to broadcasters?

Hopefully you'll see that drama programmes are incredibly popular with audiences. It is therefore important to study exactly what kinds of images these programmes are presenting to us about ourselves, and how this is done.