Birds of a Feather continues to soar, nets 6.9m viewers
Last night’s clear sky allowed many viewers around the country to take full advantage of spectacular scenes of the cosmos by staying safe inside and watching it on TV.
After three long nights, Dara O’Briain, Professor Brian Cox and Liz Bonnin hung up their fashionable scarves in last night’s final episode of Stargazing Live (BBC Two, 8pm). The fourth series of the educational astronomy show began its minuscule run on Tuesday and managed to pull in 2.5 million viewers for the first two nights.
Last night’s finale went and did one better, with viewers crowded around the TV in the vain hope that Professor Cox and his team would hold back on the melodic lamenting and actually uncover something of worth.
A notable 2.8 million viewers watched as professional purveyor of hilarity, Dara, took it upon himself to investigate if humans could actually travel faster than the speed of light… by simply talking about it. This being BBC Two on a Thursday night, the production team failed to build their own temporal displacement device to test, instead exciting theories were thrown around the studio rather than actual people.
Unfortunately, Stargazing Live is not on the same budget grade as Top Gear and an 11% share watched the missed opportunity for some dangerous stunts all in the name of education.
If that wasn’t bad enough, BBC One was also trying to educate the viewing masses, but at least Dolphins – Spy in the Pod (8pm) did actually manage to build sinister looking robots.
The second and final part of the animal infiltration show was at pains to tell us how intelligent the majestic marine mammals are but immediately destroyed that theory by plopping a robotic baby dolphin (that looked like a 1970s discarded Blue Peter project) and convincing the pod it was real through pre-recorded conversation.
Last night’s aquatic adventure in betrayal saw a noticeable fall in the audience, down from last week’s 4.9 million to 3.6 million viewers. The final half of the David Tennant-narrated fun secured a 15% share.
As hard as they tried to bamboozle us with learning, it was ITV’s enticing mixture of soap and resuscitated comedy that bagged the 8pm slot. Unusually, the second episode of Emmerdale (ITV, 8pm) improved upon the first slice of rural drama at 7pm by 200,000 viewers.
The latest prostitution scandal in the UK’s most beloved sleepy village secured 6.9 million viewers, resulting in a 30% share and the day’s second biggest audience.
The second weapon in ITV’s 8-9pm arsenal came in the form of Chigwell’s finest in Birds of a Feather (ITV, 8:30pm). The second new episode in 16 years saw Sharon, Tracey and Dorien go to very extreme lengths to pay the bills (allowing a TOWIE star to cameo in a misguided attempt at popularity truly is scraping the bottom of the barrel).
Not that the popularity of the revival was affected that much, 6.8 million viewers – down from last week’s 7.5 million – tuned in to see Dorien, the sassy septuagenarian, being forced to flog all of her designer tat at an Essex boot sale, securing a 28% share.
9pm brought viewers back to the cosmos (or at least got them looking up at it) for the post-mortem show Stargazing Live: Back to Earth (BBC Two), netting 1.7 million viewers.
Over on BBC One, the 17th series of Silent Witness (9pm) continued as Dr Nikki opened a brand new case with help from her edgy new hairdo and her latest just-out-of-the-packet-fresh helper man. 5.3 million viewers caught up with the first part of a violent new story focusing on the hunt for a killer targeting gay men, securing the 9pm slot with a 21% share.
Elsewhere, Benidorm (ITV, 9pm) brought in 5.3 million viewers, the latest bout of man tears from Lee Ryan on Celebrity Big Brother (Channel 5, 9pm) was watched by 2 million viewers, a figure matched by a new series of The Undateables on Channel 4.
Celebrity Big Brother continued to top the Twitter charts, generating a peak of 9019 tweets per minute during broadcast.
In the end, Thursday’s biggest audience was brought together by a social get-together in the Queen Vic – a situation historically obliged to provide some kind of drama. Ian Beale has been stalked by misery and misfortune since the very first episode of EastEnders (BBC One, 7:30pm) so it’s a wonder he can a) get out of bed in the morning and b) still have the pulling power to secure a 16th wife in the shape of Denise Fox.
7.3 million viewers joined the engagement party, which naturally ended up with tears, long stolen glances and the usual bust-ups. Ian Beale’s deluded sense of hope and optimism secured a 33% share and proved to be the day’s biggest show.
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