TV & VIDEO - Dec. 14, 1987

“Holy boob tube, Batman!” Look who’s boosting British telly ratings. When a technicians’ strike crippled the morning talk show on Britain’s Independent Television network, one of Britain’s morning talk shows last month, executives replaced a portion of it with “Batman,” the 1960s camp hit that starred Adam West as the Caped Crusader and Burt Ward as his exclamation-spewing sidekick Robin. Since then, the show has added about 100,000 new viewers, network officials said. Many of them have written to Independent Television saying they prefer the Dynamic Duo over regular news.