Ivan also calculated the best performing channels of the week. TV channels have a deliberate points advantage. B = BBC, R = BBC Radio, C = Channel, I = ITV. 

We had two particularly strong weeks in Week 5 and Week 7: the former had Messiah, Mahler and the Peel Night, the latter had Herzog and Matthew Collings, and both had Late Night Poker. The worst week was Week 4, which was the week that saw the start of C5's ill-conceived "Dealing with Devilfish" Poker series.

Telly's best week, curiously, was the bank holiday that was Week 5, though the best programme was a repeat of Travels with Pevsner presented by Ration-Book favourite Jonathan Meades (in fat-era form). Radio peaked alongside the cricket in Week 6, before hitting Quote...Unquote again. "Kubrick Afternoon" on I3 helped film to its biggest bounty in Week 7.

In all, Film and Radio were up, but TV was down on the Spring run of the Ration Book. Here then are the channel totals (last season's placing, and points difference in brackets):
 

Let's take each channel in turn:

BBC 4 regains the lead for the first time since last year. This has been through a steady combination of Heimat, Arrested Development, a run of good films and repeats of Travels with Pevsner. This stretch of rationing began with the Hollywood UK season, and ended with the Lost Decade season. Between the two we also got a week of Werner Herzog. B4 is at its best when it is showing archive material, but this run is proof that it can also do documentaries like it says it can. That said, TimeShift is a shadow of its former self, and there isn't the same plundering of the archives that there was a couple of years ago.

Channel 4 has taken the good long hard look at itself that I advised last time round, and has regained the ground it had lost (and more besides). A lot of this has been down to films, but not all. In fact the two biggest contributers are most definitely Matthew Collings' Self Portraits, and the return (albeit amateur) of Late Night Poker. The cricket did its share too, of course, but most of the rest of the time, C4 is still plundering the C5 ideas bag for dreary reality toss and charts drawn on the back of fag packets (this week, Ascent of Man fails to make the n best documentaries!). Now we have More4, which will probably become the ITV3 and BBC4 of the Four empire. This is, of course, a double-edged sword.

BBC 2 has been deposed from two books at the top of the chart. is this the final strands of B2iness jumping ship to B4? Or is it something else? The answer is probably comedy. There's been very little comedy on BBC2 of late. The best it got was probably Extras and Absolute Power, neither of which are classics. Couple this with the flawed documentary behemoth that was Coast, and the lack of any Cruikshanky stuff, and you have a vacuum in BBC2 land. We're also in Horizon season, and while that may be slightly better now than in recent years, it's still a bit rubbish. When all is said and done though, it's not disasterous to be the the third best channel. But it is cause for concern to be haemorrhaging 19pts (cf. C4, which only lost 4pts when I started laying into it for dumbing down).

BBC 7 is the best radio station. Actually, that's not true. R5 is the best radio station, but its content is largely exempt from this ration-book (news is not rationed). Given its brief, BBC7 should be pretty high anyway, given that it's the cream of BBC radio drama and comedy from ever. But because it's all repeats, it can only score if I recommend it. This says a lot more about the other stations than it does about B7 really. All that being what it might be, the real reason for this high position is that On the Hour has been on, and I've been habitually over-rating it.

ITV 1... Well I never. Up into 5th for the first time ever, and just in time for its 50th birthday. Perhaps the two are related. Only very slightly, as it turns out. No, I1 mainly gets its points from films. They have a lot of good films do the ITV. As for the 50th birthday stuff, most of it has been shit. Even Melvyn's docs on the matter were rubbish. The only saving grace really has been Ant & Dec, and that's been patchy at best. Though YTV (or rather ITV Yorkshire) did have a passable doc, and no-doubt there were others out there in the vestages of regional variation. It's films where ITV does best these days (though they had a small bit of badly played poker this season, too). Gone are the government-shaking documentaries and the mad quiz shows. It's all reality freak shows and DIY fraudsters from Hell. But let's stop for a while and consider the good television on the ITV. It's not often done, but let us try. Here then is a list of half-decent (and sometimes decent) stuff that was on the ITV last week: 
CD:UK, Inspector Morse, Ant & Dec, Jonathan Dimbleby, Motor Sport, South Bank Show, Loose Women, My Parents Are Aliens, The Bill.
Now, to be evil, a list of shit:
Barbera, Holiday Airport, You've Been Framed, ITV News, Heartbeat, This Morning, Trading Treasures, Paul o'Grady, Tonight with Trevor McDonald, Jeremy Kyle, Kinky Boots: The Premiere, Airline.
Of course, we can do this with any channel, but that's no fun. If we're going to be serious, ITV has a great programme in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and has plenty of other little gems such as Creature Comforts. It's easy to get misty-eyed about the olden days of ITV, but the fact is that Jimmys was better than Real Families, World in Action was better than Tonight with Trevor McDonald, and Coronation Street and the news were both just better. Cora was actually a really good programme as recently as the early '90s. Now it's a shorthand for all that is wrong with its parent channel. And yet, here that channel is at No.5 in the Summer chart. So it's not all bad, eh? Let us consider that the best thing on ITV today is a quiz in which a member of the public answers a series of questions for sums of money which double in value. So things aren't all that different from 50 years ago, when Double Your Money was on.

Radio 4 scored as many points this time as last. Both occasions were sullied by runs of Quote...Unquote, and the run of ISIHAC this time around was woefully short. Could they at least schedule it so that Quote coincides with The News Quiz? 

BBC 3 is another channel that's not moved much. It ticks along nicely, by tending to have at least one half-decent comedy on the boil. It tied this season with ITV 3, which also stayed more or less in the same area as before. Hammer House of Horrors, still the best thing it's had on, returns this week for another airing. On the same peg as the two 3s is BBC1, which no longer has Dr Who to keep it propped up. Still, it's higher than it was on the Easter run of the ration book. 

Radio 5's appearances in this chart are rarely more than tokenistic, and this time is no exception. Mayo and Drive are still essential listening of a weekday. Radio 3 dropped 6pts, but that's just down to less Mahler or whatever.

ITV 2 is a crap channel, with the very occasional film on. This is how it got here. It has no other redeeming features (except perhaps Hell's Kitchen USA). Radio 2 got here on the strength of a Mark Radcliffe session, one of those loop-holes that's fell out of use a bit since Peel died. R1 has really suffered on that score, though the Radio Times could help by giving more session details. Finally, QuizCall is a very silly, morally dubious channel in the wilds of freeview, that entertained me once with a dubious and unwinable quiz.

There is a conspicuous absence in this season's chart, and that is Spring's number 3. Five is nowhere to be seen. Its latest Poker effort was rubbish, Angel has still not shown up, and Tim Marlow has run out of paintings. I'm reliably informed that House is alright, but I've not seen it yet myself. And there's clearly been no films on either. Very odd. C5 was doing so well last time round, wearing all of C4's cast-offs. Something has gone terribly wrong. To be beaten by QuizCall and ITV2 is pitiful. And we can't blame a lack of press promotion really, because I really sift the telly-paper. It's just saturated with Killer Shark Live and other sub-ITV docs at the moment. Stuff that would look tacky in a women's magazine, let alone on a major national television station. Still, only next week, Marlow is back for starters. So I predict a slightly better showing next time around. Ho hum. 

I'm having a week off before we start the run-up to Christmas.

While I'm away, there's actually quite a few things on that look half decent, including Bernard Hill as a scarily convincing David Blunkett in the launch programming for More4. There were one or two other things I'd normally get excited about mentioning, but I've not got the paper in front of me and I can't remember what they were. So keep your wits about you and I'll be sure to put some good stuff away for you for next time, eh.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you then.