1957-59 - It's All In The Game

The top 20 chart for 1957 is the first to be ranked by million of homes viewing rather than percentage of available audience viewing, and two sitcoms featured in the list that year, Life With The Lyons and The Army Game.

Life With The Lyons, the year's #15, had begun as a BBC radio series, featuring actor Ben Lyon, his wife Bebe Daniels, and their children, which had run since 1951. It then became a TV series on the BBC in 1955 and 1956, before transferring to the other side, Associated Rediffusion to be precise, in 1957, even though the radio series continued on BBC Radio throughout the ITV series. All the various series featured the almost true to life events in the families lives as a sort of docu-sitcom, albeit a scripted one, with future Rentaghost writer Bob Block one of the most prolific writers, alongside Bebe herself. Another connection to Rentaghost existed in the shape of actress Molly Weir, who would later portray the McWitch, but here was the Lyons housekeeper, Aggie McDonald. Life With The Lyons achieved a peak rating of 2.94 million homes in 1957.

The most watched sitcom of 1957, and 4th most watched show overall, was Granada's The Army Game, probably the first truly sucessful British sitcom, which ran for over 150 episodes between 1957 and 1961. It was a comic look at army life, at a time when National Service was still compulsory in the UK and featured an ever changing cast which at various times included the likes of William Hartnell, Michael Medwin, Alfie Bass, Charles Hawtrey, Bernard Bresslaw, Bill Fraser, Frank Williams and even Dick Emery. In 1957 its peak viewing figure was 3.21 million homes. I don't know for sure which precise episode achieved that peak rating, but it would have probably been in the last couple of months of the year (I have no record of any show getting a figure of 3m homes before Nov 1957) and therefore either from the end of the first series, or right at the beginning of the second series, so I will link a couple of example episodes from that period here. The first is presumably the last episode of Series 1 from 4th December 1957 and the other is the second episode of series 2, from 27th December 1957.

The only sitcom to make the annual top 20 in 1958 was again The Army Game and again at #4, now peaking at 4.65m homes.

In 1959 there were two sitcoms in the year's top 20. ATV's The Larkins were at #19 on peak viewing figure of 4.87m homes. The Larkins starred Peggy Mount and David Kossoff as cockney couple Ada and Alf Larkin, The most watched sitcom in the UK, for the third year running, was The Army Game, with a new peak viewing figure of 5.72m homes.