Parking Mad wins over 9pm viewers fourth week in a row
Thursday night saw BBC One’s latest observational documentary wrap up after four episodes and a hugely successful run, as the traffic wardens of Parking Mad (9pm) hung up their ticket-issuing tools for the last time.
For the past three Thursday evenings, the programme that documents the country’s ‘traffic wars’ (apparently a real thing that’s been happening) has secured the 9pm slot with the biggest audience share as protesters, activists and councils clash.
The final episode of the thrilling series saw Islington vigilante, the Black Beret, get into a legal wrangle with his local branch of government, bringing in the biggest 9pm audience. The successful run ended with 3.8 million viewers tuning in, translating to an 18% share.
Over on ITV, presenter Nicky Campbell continued his emotionally manipulative odyssey through the adoption process in the third episode of Wanted: A Family of My Own (9pm). A standard 2.2 million viewers tuned in to see various prospective parents go through the emotional roller-coaster, netting a 10% share.
At the same time, self-titled ‘irreverent’ chef Heston Blumenthal was busy mucking about with unnecessarily large portions of food in the latest episode of his new series. The second episode of Heston’s Great British Food (Channel 4, 9pm) saw the celebrity cook turn his hand to home-grown twists on Indian food, which of course led him to create an insanely giant-sized poppadom, because that’s basically all he does.
Heston’s popularity hasn’t grow over the past week, with last night’s let-feck-about-with-the-recipe-just-for-the-sake-of-it fun pulling in the exact same audience as last week’s opening episode. Yesterday saw a little over 1 million viewers watch as the renegade culinary king created a brand new dish, ‘beeryani’ (beer and rice for the uneducated), netting a 5% share.
Channel 5’s tactic for the 9pm slot was to charm viewers into submission with an alarming documentary about a serial killer that sexually terrorised South London’s elderly in the 80s.
As the title suggested, The OAP Killer: First Kill, Last Kill (9pm) only focused on the bookend murders – because prime time viewers obviously don’t have the time for an actual thoughtful analysis of the horrifying events. The exploitative and thrown-together drivel brought in 962,000 viewers and a 5% share.
Earlier at 8pm on BBC One, the unstoppable MasterChef machine rattled on to its 20th episode of the series as the final five contestants had to deal with John Torode and Gregg Wallace’s ever-increasing dramatics. Just over 5 million viewers watched as the surviving competitors were forced to cook meals for dusty historians in a creepy castle, netting a 33% share.
On Channel 4, the seriously suspect world of Posh Pawn (8pm) continued as more questionable people poured into the offices of Prestige Pawnbrokers with all their high-end tat in tow. Channel 4’s biggest audience of the day, 1.5 million viewers, caught up with the latest exciting bout of luxury goods flogging.
Over on BBC Three, 662,000 heartbroken fans of quality world music tuned in to see Ireland crash out of the Eurovision Song Contest 2014: Semi-Finals at 8pm.
A little earlier on BBC Two at 7pm, England squared up to Ukraine in an electrifying qualifier for the World Cup live from glamorous Shrewsbury. In the end, England’s 4-0 victory didn’t do anything to help the popularity of Women’s World Cup Football (7pm) which was watched by only 961,000 viewers and a 5% share.
At the same time on ITV, the first of two Emmerdales kicked off with 5.7 million viewers tuning in at 7pm, while the 8pm showing fell to just over 5 million.
On BBC One at 7:30pm, paranoia was sweeping through Albert Square as practically everyone became a suspect in Lucy’s murder, ensuring the scriptwriters get as much mileage out of the murder as humanly possible.
Thursday’s biggest audience watched EastEnders with Lauren Branning’s new-found Nancy Drew persona attempting to catch a mysterious suspect. 6.7 million viewers tuned in to watch as Lauren realised that practically everyone in her postcode was having it off with one another, resulting in a 34% share.
When the Eurovision fun finally wrapped up at 10pm, it was time for BBC Three to air the latest spin-off from Summer Heights High as Jonah from Tonga (10pm) got his very own TV show. Following on from this year’s Ja’ime: Private School Girl, the new series saw Jonah struggle in an Australian school after returning from his banishment to Tonga and generated 18 tweets for every 1,000 viewers.
Despite putting the entire series live for a limited time on the iPlayer last weekend, the spoof documentary still netted 358,000 viewers and a 2% 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.