2.6m viewers join The Choir on BBC Two
Monday night saw the Beeb offer up a double helping of horror in the prime time slot as Ripper Street and The Choir: Sing While You Work both went out at 9pm – with Gareth Malone’s man beard out-terrifying anything the period slasher drama had to offer.
After facing off drug smugglers, crazed killers and sadistic psychopaths, the third episode of Ripper Street‘s (BBC One, 9pm) second series saw the Victorian detectives deal with their biggest challenge yet – a deadly swarm of crazed and irrational feminists.
As per usual, the grimy detective drama’s portrayal of a swarm of radical suffragettes was as far from subtle as imaginable, with prominent members of society getting nabbed from East End music halls and dusty brothels.
Despite offering viewers a visually gritty and gruesome escape on dark and damp Monday nights, the past three weeks have seen the audience steadily decline. After the opening episode attracted nearly 5 million viewers, this week’s tale of corsets and progression managed to bring in 3.9 million.
However, the significant drop didn’t stop Ripper Street beating the 9pm competition, with a share of 17% watching as brothel owner Long Susan (not her birth name) got swept up in the guerilla movement.
Over on BBC Two, Gareth Malone and his newly planted face rug of masculinity headed to Birmingham on his latest quest to distract staff from their duties in The Choir: Sing While You Work (9pm).
The choirmaster’s work was facing an uphill challenge at Birmingham City Council as the second episode of the second series saw the perky and peppy everyday singers facing a round of job cuts. An audience of 2.6 million viewers watched as the civil servants decided to sing the pain away, netting an 11% share.
ITV filled up a gaping hole in its schedule with a repeat of the second half of small town thriller, A Mother’s Son (9pm). In the concluding part of the drama, poor old Hermione Norris was still having a hard time of it, convinced one of her sons was responsible for a local girls death.
2.6 million viewers (down from last week’s 3.2 million) tuned in to see if the psychological cracks had formed in Norris’ middle class dream or whether the cracks could be smoothed over with a sly sniff of rescue remedy, resulting in a 10% share.
At the same time an audience share of 7% tuned in to celebrate the end of the traumatic but ultimately rewarding second series of 999: What’s Your Emergency? on Channel 4. After the first series exclusively stuck to Blackpool and angered locals with such negative vignettes week after week, series two went nationwide – an equal opportunities exercise to demonstrate just how horrific life can be anywhere in the UK.
Over the past few weeks, the documentary has maximised its traumatising nature by focusing on specific depressing themes each episode, with tales of alcoholics and the over 65 pulling in steady audiences of over 1 million viewers.
Knowing all the stops had to be pulled out for the final episode, the fly-on-the-ambulance-wall show decided to put the little cherubs of the UK in life and death situations, netting 1.7 million viewers and the channel’s biggest audience of the day.
Earlier in the topsy turvy world of soap land, Coronation Street once again ran away with Monday’s gold and silver statues, with Emmerdale and EastEnders left behind to desperately scrap it out for sloppy thirds.
ITV’s reigning king kicked off at 7:30pm with the day’s biggest audience tuning in to see Roy tell a little white lie to Hayley, promising that he’ll help her die when the time comes. The first episode of Coronation Street brought in 8.9 million viewers (a 39% share), with the second visit at 8:30pm resulting in a smaller audience of 8 million viewers.
The second episode of euthanasia-themed Monday night action was up against the slightly less draining Panorama (8:30pm) on BBC One but The Great House Price Bubble? still managed to attract 2.7 million viewers.
Sandwiched between the Weatherfield action – and up against BBC One’s EastEnders (8pm) – was a show which saw Robson Green plod around the North, wondering where it all went so right for Jerome Flynn. Tales from Northumberland with Robson Green (ITV, 8pm) did manage to attract an impressive 3.9 million viewers but couldn’t compete with the Walford drama.
Out of nowhere – and just to keep us all on our toes – 7.3 million viewers watched the latest action from Albert Square, just beating Emmerdale‘s audience of 7 million.
EastEnders also rode high on Twitter, generating 5,961 tweets. This was only behind Made In Chelsea (E4, 10pm) which not only had a minuscule audience of 509,000 viewers but it turned out they weren’t even paying proper attention to the storyline.
The ‘fabricated reality’ (surely two words that never belong together) show had 19% of its audience tweeting about it while it was on, resulting in 99,224 tweets.
The Social TV Analytics report is a daily leaderboard displaying the latest social TV analytics Twitter data from SecondSync. The table shows the top UK TV shows as they are mentioned on Twitter, which MediaTel has correlated with the BARB overnight programme ratings for those shows (only viewable to BARB subscribers).
Overnight data is available each morning in mediatel.co.uk’s TV Database, with all BARB registered subscribers able to view reports for terrestrial networks and key multi-channel stations.