Manchester United’s latest trashing peaks at 6.2m on ITV
Tuesday night saw Channel 4’s flagship culinary experience, The Taste (9pm), rummage through the butcher’s bin in a desperate bid to entice just a few more viewers to the jump on board the sinking gastronomic ship.
The eighth episode of the blind spoon-tasting contest saw the remaining contestants challenged with whipping up a taste bud treat by using the less popular parts of an animal. An audience of 768,000 viewers watched as Nigella and her accented counterparts gobbled down some snout and tripe, resulting in a 3.2% share.
While not popular in the traditional sense of the word, the cooking equivalent of The Voice (which says it all really) has attracted a rigid audience over the past eight weeks, although there is little chance of the show reaching mainstream audiences before it slowly rattles towards the inevitable end in two weeks’ time.
Much more popular was BBC One’s safe and comfortable drama about murder and slaughter, Death in Paradise (9pm). The penultimate episode of the third series saw the latest lead bumbling white man, Kris Marshall, stuck on isolated island…with a killer!
While the show finally embraced its Scooby Doo origins, the completely natural sexual chemistry between DI Humphrey and DS Camille finally came to a head when a storm trapped them on a dead millionaire’s island home.
A whopping 6.5 million viewers tuned in to see if the BBC had the balls to kill off the latest leading man so soon after Ben Miller’s fictional demise (hint: they didn’t), resulting in the biggest prime time audience and a healthy 27% share.
ITV’s big offering of the night came in the shape of the latest UEFA Champions League (7:30pm) live from Karaiskakis Stadium in Greece. Thankfully, there were only fifteen minutes of top notch banter and analytics from rosy-cheeked Adrian Chiles and his angry little friend Roy Keane before the 7:45pm kick-off.
An average audience of 4.9 million viewers tuned in to see Man United get their arses handed to them by home team Olympiakos, with just over 1 million of those viewers choosing to watch the action in glorious HD.
The commercial broadcaster saw the audience peak at 6.2 million viewers in the 38th minute as Domínguez heralded the beginning of United’s defeat by scoring the game’s first goal. The second goal for the Olympiakos team brought in 5.9 million viewers in the 54th minute, with Man United failing to strike back successfully.
The 8pm slot saw Holby City (BBC One) perform to its usual standards, attracting a decent 4.8 million viewers (a 21% share) with its enticing mix of emergency surgery and surging hormones.
Over on BBC Two was the second episode of The Great British Sewing Bee (8pm), a series nowhere near as popular as its baking cousin. 2.6 million viewers tuned in to see the second series carry on regardless, with the familiar pattern of tasks, stern but friendly judges and last-minute screw-ups netting an 11% share.
Meanwhile on Channel 4, Kirsty Allsop spun some more untruths about the ease of domestic bliss as she basically went through the exact motions that the Location format requires – the twist here being that her equally smug male counterpart was nowhere to be seen.
Kirstie’s Best of Both Worlds (8pm) was about as repetitive as the property genre gets, with the first episode of the painfully familiar show netting Channel 4’s biggest audience of the day with 1.5 million viewers and a 7% share.
Earlier in the day, the latest drama from Emmerdale brought in ITV’s biggest audience of the day with 6.1 million viewers tuning in.
But it was the BBC’s never-ending tale of urban desolation – set in an alternative universe where the people of East London actually know who lives next to them – that took Tuesday’s top spot. An audience of 7.3 million watched as Kat and the newly returned Stacey mulled over their deal with Janine, with the latest shouty scenes from EastEnders netting a 33% 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.