TELEVISION - March 29, 1996

Record PBS Drive: KOCE-TV Channel 50, Orange County’s PBS station, logged a record $343,959 from its recently completed 19-day pledge drive, a spokeswoman announced Thursday. That’s almost $7,000 more than the station took in during its 1995 spring drive, which ran two days longer than this year’s. The station also picked up nearly 800 new contributors this year, said KOCE’s Judith Schaefer. That mirrored a national trend for PBS stations. Network officials announced Thursday that the March membership drive has already surpassed last year’s record-setting total, even though several major-market stations, including Los Angeles’ KCET-TV Channel 28, don’t wrap up their drives until this weekend. So far, more than 583,000 public television viewers have pledged $49 million to local stations--PBS’ biggest on-air pledge drive ever and an 11% increase over 1995’s then-record total of $44.2 million. PBS said the drive has been boosted by the extremely strong showing of “Great Performances: ‘Les Miserables’ in Concert.” Many stations reported raising more money in its first showing than from any other program in their histories.