Musketeers fend off Mr Selfridge for BBC One Sunday glory
Kylie Minogue and her highly excitable group of mismatched friends brought a ray of sunshine to Saturday night television as the country fended off a bleak and wintry evening.
The fourth episode of the third series of the genteel singing competition proved once again that The Voice UK can indeed soar (it also really, really helps when it’s strategically scheduled against something much worse on the other side).
A whopping 8.5 million viewers tuned in to yet another round of blind auditions (the tension!), securing Saturday’s biggest audience and a 37% share.
Over on ITV, Splash! performed admirably with an audience of 3.6 million viewers watching desperate celebrities plunge to new depths (from some amazing heights!), resulting in a 16% share.
Straight afterwards on the same channel, 60 gobby spray-tanned clones traded verbal daggers in order to defeat each other and get close to an actual man on Take Me Out (8:20pm). 3.3 million viewers watched as Paddy McGuinness got the females under control with his trademark smarts, wit and charm, securing a 15% share.
Replacing Antiques Roadshow for some Sunday afternoon middle-aged escapism was a completely different show in which Fiona Bruce (yes, her off Antiques Roadshow) was publicly shaming boastful owners of antiques in Fake or Fortune? (BBC One, 6pm).
This week Fiona and obnoxious art dealer Philip Mould attempted to make a grown man cry by pointing and laughing at him and telling him that his Marc Chagall original was, in fact, a dodgy knock off.
Due to the fact that the deflated property developer bought the painting for £100,000 a few years ago, the tinging revelation even made the news.
Despite being scientifically designed to send people of a certain age into a tranquil stupor, 4.4 million viewers watched stressful scenes, including Fiona delivering the news that the retirement fund forgery would have to be destroyed, netting a 20% share.
Straight up afterwards was a much more relaxing experience as the plucky Countryfile (BBC One, 7pm) scoured the country to bring trusting viewers all the hard-hitting agricultural issues that matter.
Sunday’s second biggest audience frantically tuned in to see Matt Baker use his prime time charisma to guide viewers around the ruins of a burnt down country house while Helen Skelton hunted down malicious creatures in Wyre forest. 6.8 million viewers watched the essential Sunday shenanigans, resulting in a 29% share.
While the BBC was busy educating the nation about great art forgeries and great recipes for pigswill (matters we can all relate to), ITV was busy turning viewers’ minds to mush with a pageantry of sparkles, frost and bright lights with Dancing on Ice (ITV, 6:15pm).
5.4 million viewers held their breath as the nerve-racking competition reached the halfway point – an edge-of-the-seat thrill ride which saw illustrious famous people like Suzanne Shaw, Gareth Gates and Ray Quinn skate to the death in a futuristic dystopian hell.
Just because two hours of the main show wasn’t enough, viewers had to wait for Dancing on Ice: The Results at 8:30pm to see Bonnie Langford’s skating career terminated, capturing a lower audience of 4 million viewers.
However, it was at 8pm when the weekend’s big battle would take place as the feisty nuns of Nonnatus House went head to head with a new series of smug and affluent mechanophilia-fanatics of Top Gear (BBC Two, 8pm).
Audiences at home were eager to get involved in the top-notch conversations, resulting in Top Gear become the most tweeted about show yesterday. The auto mobile antics generated 60,233 tweets, hitting a peak of 2,700 per minutes. This meant that there was 11 tweets for every 1,000 viewers watching.
An audience of 5.3 million viewers tuned in for some top-shelf, free-flowing, off-the-cuff banter from the masters of sound bites, resulting in a 19% share which meant that, ultimately, Richard Hammond and his arrogant friends were beat to a pulp by the crowd of baying holy sisters on BBC’s flagship channel, as the unwavering popularity of Call the Midwife (BBC One, 8pm) failed to wane.
Last night’s adventures in birthing saw Trixie pop along to Holloway Prison for a nice day out, securing 8.9 million viewers and a 32% share.
There was more competition on the 9pm slot as the penultimate episode of The Jump (Channel 4) was watched by a standard 1.6 million viewers, with Dragon’s Den (BBC Two) bringing in 3 million viewers at the same time.
There was also plenty of scripted goodness on offer as Mr Selfridge (9pm) continued to provide ITV with the most elaborate promotional tie-in ever as some characters walked around a prominent London retail space and mentioned it a lot.
While a healthy 4.3 million viewers tuned in to see the latest shopping drama, it couldn’t compete with the whiff of adventure on offer on BBC One.
For the third week in a row, The Musketeers (BBC One) rode away with Sunday’s biggest 9pm audience as the gang were on the hunt for Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica. 5.4 million (down from the opening episode’s 7.4 million ) viewers watched as one of the Muskehounds had to face up to his past, netting a 22% share and a fittingly fun end to the weekend.
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.