5.9m tune for ITV’s pageantry of pomp
Wednesday evening saw the TV schedule inundated with a heavy slice of prime time glitter and pomp as the self-congratulatory festival of backslapping that is The National Television Awards 2014 (ITV, 7:30pm) took place.
Last night saw all of your favourite stars of the small screen pack into the O2 Arena in London to celebrate another year of successful schedule-filling.
The 19th annual awards ceremony – where ordinary plebs like you and I get to lift the beautiful and relatively famous on our collective shoulders, holding them up to shine like the stars they are – saw the crème de la crème of sneery dance judges with comedy European accents descend upon East London to each bag their share of exposure.
With over a two and a half hour running time, viewers were reminded numerous times of the importance of this particular accolade, with each highly sought-after trophy representing the nation’s acceptance (which is worth its weight in gold for those damaged and needy celebrity types).
Kind of like those political elections that pop up every few years (except more people participate), the UK named Doctor Who Best Drama Series, with the departed 11th Doctor Matt Smith, taking home the prize for best drama performance.
As expected, the unstoppable Coronation Street beat off its lesser rivals to win Best Serial Drama with the Julie Hesmondhalgh walking away with Best Serial Drama Performance for her turn as terminally ill Hayley.
Other nuggets of knowledge gleamed from the event; Mrs Brown’s Boys remained popular with the general public, as did the easily-digestible comedy stylings of Ant and Dec who won their 13th consecutive award (because this is what happens when people living on society’s margins are given a voice by the media).
In total, 5.9 million viewers tuned in to see Strictly‘s judges parade around the arena, gurning with such high self-opinion that you’d be convinced they just cured cancer or achieved something of actual note.
The procession of ego garnered the day’s second biggest audience, a 26% share and topped the Twitter chart. A peak of 4,508 tweets per minute resulted in the awards show being the most talked about programme on Twitter, with a total of 233,238 during the broadcast.
Half an hour earlier, the news of Hayley’s death spread around the street quicker than…that wildfire that spread around the street at a high speed last year. If Monday’s Coronation Street (ITV, 7pm) was a difficult watch, last night didn’t let up on the general awfulness as a stoic Roy was forced to let go of his late wife’s hand.
The recent emotional desolation in Weatherfield certainly had the nation hooked, with 7.7 million tuning in, resulting in Wednesday’s most watched show.
Later at 9pm, Kirtsy Young, a crime-solving rugby player and a bunch of cheesy sound bites sculpted together to look like a man, brought us the latest edition of Crimewatch (BBC One). Unfortunately, viewers’ attention was captured by the glamour and pageantry over on ITV, with a slightly lower than usual 2.8 million viewers tuning in for the monthly bout of curtain twitching.
There was more traumatising comfort telly over on channel 4 as 24 Hours in A&E (9pm) brought us another round of horrific life or death injuries for our entertainment. 1.6 million viewers watched as laughter was sprinkled in with the dollop of tragedy, bringing in the channel’s biggest audience and a 7% share.
Over on Channel Five, the ‘normal one’ (seriously, humanity is doomed) was evicted from Celebrity Big Brother (9pm), with Liz Jones no doubt planning her next series of books based on the trauma she had to endure on the inside. 1.9 million viewers went along for the semi-coherent ride, netting a 9% share.
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. Overnight data supplied by TRP are based on 15 minute slot averages. This may differ from tape checked figures, which are based on a programme’s actual start and end time.