TV Overnights: Closing ceremony wins 26m viewers

Last night’s Olympic closing ceremony attracted a peak audience of 26 million viewers.

The ceremony, with performances from the Spice Girls, Take That and The Who, banked 22.9 million average viewers and a massive 80.7% audience share for BBC One between 9pm on Sunday and the early hours of Monday morning. 18.5 million viewers were still tuned in to the ceremony at midnight.

Another 202,000 tuned in to the BBC’s dedicated Olympics channels, BBC Olympics 1, and 83,000 watched in 3D on BBC HD.

Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, which kick-started the Games on 27 July, secured an average audience of 23 million viewers.

On Saturday night, a peak audience of 12.3 million viewers tuned in to BBC One to watch live coverage of Mo Farah’s second gold medal win and the Jamaican team smash the world record in the 4 x 100m relay.

In the past 16 days, there have been 150 million tweets about the Olympics, with the biggest conversations and mentions (measured by tweets per minute) around Usain Bolt’s 200m and 100m victories, Andy Murray’s gold medal at Wimbledon and Jamaica’s new world record in the men’s relay.

BBC One dominated last night’s TV ratings – as it has done for the past two weeks – with ITV1’s Touch of Frost pulling in just 635,000 viewers during the 9pm to 11pm prime time slot. On Channel 4, Thelma’s Gypsy Girls reached 698,000 viewers (a 2.2% average share), while 483,000 viewers tuned in to Channel 5’s Big Brother.

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.