Strictly breaks the 10m barrier twice over the weekend
As is traditional when Christmas approaches, the past weekend’s big performers made up a smorgasbord of epically long, glitzy and competitive ‘reality’ content with BBC One’s Strictly Come Dancing (BBC One, 7pm) breaking through the 10 million viewer mark not once, but twice.
Saturday saw some of the six remaining celebrities up their game to secure a place in next week’s quarter finals (these things tend to drag on). The most watched show of the entire weekend had the exhibitionists perform their moves to some familiar tunes from musicals, just to add an unnecessary extra dose of twinkle and sparkle to the proceedings.
Saturday night’s performance attracted an audience of 10.1 million foxtrot aficionados and an impressive 42% share.
Sunday evening’s results show also didn’t disappoint with the fabricated tension helping to make it the second biggest hit of the weekend. Just over 10 million viewers tuned in to see Strictly Come Dancing: The Results and class clown Mark Benton being sent on his merry way, resulting in a 40% share.
The dancing farce’s weekend competition, The X Factor (ITV, 8pm), was left trailing behind with 7.7 million (a 32% share) tuning in for the grand karaoke experience on Saturday, with Sunday’s results show (ITV, 8pm) managing to secure the exact same amount of dwindling but dedicated viewers.
As usual, Ant and Dec’s winter holiday in Australia’s balmy Gold Coast did quite well for itself – whether there was an oversupply of similar programming or not. Friday’s jaunt to the jungle at 9pm was watched by 8.4 million viewers, while Saturday’s edition of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! fell to 7.7 million, perhaps due to its late start at 9:45pm.
Sunday brought the first camp evitction of the series, with Annabel Giles’s departure boosting the audience to a much healthier 9.3 million viewers and a 38% share.
Elsewhere on Sunday on BBC One, the glamorous world of haberdashery and frilly things seen in The Paradise secured 4.4 million viewers at 8pm, while earlier the unstoppable phenomenon that is Countryfile (6:15pm) secured a whopping 7.3 million excited viewers.
ITV’s other big hit of the day came in the seemingly extremely popular form of Holly Willoughby and her bag of tear-inducing surprises. The latest Surprise Surprise still didn’t feature Cilla Black but Holly was more than game to make members of the public cry in exchange for ratings. 3.7 million viewers caught up with the manipulative tear fest at 7pm, bagging a 15% share.
Interestingly, it was the broadcast of The X Factor‘s American siblings on Saturday that got viewers tweeting. While the UK edition generated the most amount of tweets (197,630) during broadcast, The X Factor USA‘s (ITV2, 11:20am) low ratings showed that those viewers were much more engaged.
The 172,000 tweets that were generated by the American show mean that there were 553 tweets for every 1,000 viewers watching – a phenomenal reach that prime time shows either side of the Atlantic could only dream of.
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.