Thirty years on, exam performance in all the inner London boroughs would be absolutely stupendous if competition delivered year-on-year improvement.
According to Nielsen's estimates, the cooking competition delivered the night's best numbers in that demographic market, leading the 9 p.m. hour over all with 8.6 million viewers.
Not every company is as bold as GE, which last year ran an exercise called "destroyyourbusiness.com" to force managers to consider where they were most vulnerable to unexpected competition delivered by the Internet.Most old-economy companies initially choose not to re-engineer their whole business, but rather to spin off a new division to experiment.
The 8 p.m. reality competition delivered 13.7 million viewers, Nielsen estimated, easily surpassing its rivals in its time slot, Fox's "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" (9 million), a rerun of ABC's "Ugly Betty" (6.5 million) and NBC's "My Name is Earl" (6.6 million) followed by "30 Rock" (5.8 million).
Becoming president at Centre College in July 1998 represented my first hands-on experience with NCAA competition at the Division III level, and I must tell you that I quickly became a strong advocate for the style of athletic competition delivered by Centre and institutions like it.
In the history of technology and innovation, it's clear that competition delivers the best outcome.
But still I'm very curious to see what this competition delivers, especially in TV terms.
Ultimately this remains a bill of ideology: can choice and competition deliver the £20bn of savings needed in the NHS?
Competition delivers lower fares, increased choice and better service, and improves resilience, both in terms of the economy and in terms of national security.
BBC chairman Gavyn Davies has described the FA Cup as a "second-rate competition", delivering a hammer blow to the Football Association's hopes of negotiating a lucrative new deal for TV coverage of the tournament.
