Corrie’s procrastination sees audience plummet to 5.5m
Last night saw ITV mix things up a bit as Coronation Street kicked off Wednesday’s prime time TV options at the earlier-than-usual time of 7pm, with the change backfiring badly.
Providing yesterday’s TV nation with its only proper soap fix (no, Hollyoaks still doesn’t count), the Northern soap continued to thread water as viewers around the country collectively egged on a character – any character – to kill off the programme’s most recent McGuffin, Tina McIntyre, as soon as humanly possible.
For many months long-term fans have been tiring of the extremely protracted and unlikely affair between Street rapscallion Peter Barlow and painted tart Tina, with the seemingly out-of-character storylines signposting the recent behind the scenes legal ructions.
A surprisingly low audience of 5.5 million viewers braved another half an hour of the scandalous couple basically repeating and reaffirming their positions, procrastinating a little until next week’s much publicised murder.
Elsewhere, the writers played out a clever twist where a fight broke out in the café instead of the Rovers, netting a 33% audience share.
Straight afterwards, ITV’s Harry Potter love-in edged towards its conclusion with the penultimate episode of the teenage wizard’s tale taking up most of the commercial channel’s evening schedule.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (7:30pm) had the unenviable task of keeping things ticking along until the next instalment’s big climax as the franchise intermittently turned into a road movie as Harry and his two functional chums went on the run.
2.4 million viewers joined the search for the truth about Harry’s past, via the gritty streets of London’s West End and other, slightly more magical, locations. The intense chase netted a 12% share.
Over on BBC One, Anne Robinson and her league of justice-dealing tabloid sidekicks brought us another rousing edition of Watchdog (8pm).
3.8 million concerned viewers tuned in to be warned about the money-stealing dangers of that new-fangled internet shopping craze and the money-stealing dangers of those strange games consoles wot steal children souls.
An 20% share tuned in to see her simpleton assistants, Matt Allwright and Chris Hollins, talk down to the audience as if they were hosting an episode of Blue Peter for the terminally stupid, but still managed to secure the 8pm slot for BBC One.
At the same time on BBC Two, grown men were getting positively giddy about flowers as the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2014 (8pm) continued, bringing in the channel’s biggest audience of the day. 2.5 million viewers watched as Monty Don and Joe Swift excitedly took in the day’s floral exhibits, resulting in a 13% share.
Straight up afterwards was the second part of the made-for-HD visual loveliness of Coast Australia (BBC Two, 9:10pm), even if the format is littered with distractingly spritely Countryfile-esqe presenters.
This week, main presenter Neil Oliver wandered about the Sydney area, delivering his bizarre piece-to-camera segments in his usual unique manner. 2 million viewers tuned in to see the Sydney Harbour Bridge from a million different angles before the episode broadened its scope slightly, netting a 10% share.
In BBC One’s prime time spot was the first episode of a brand new series entitled Del Boys & Dealers (9pm). Somehow a documentary about watermen and estate agents is relegated to BBC Two but a documentary about auction-addicted ‘wheeler dealers’ types grabs the flagship channel’s prestigious time slot.
The first episode, entitled Luvvly Jubbly, naturally, secured the 9pm slot for BBC One, attracting an audience of 3.9 million viewers and a 19% share.
At the same time, Channel 4’s tech-superior documentary about real life and death situations gave the channel the biggest hit of the day. A little over 2 million viewers caught up with the latest day of trauma and blood in 24 Hours in A&E, with the tale of a two year old who suffered a church related injury netting a 10% share.
Just to balance things out, Channel 4 then switched into comedy mode for the next hour with the fifth episode of Derek‘s (10pm) second series bringing in just under 1 million viewers. Despite the relatively low figures, the mock doc comedy was the second most tweeted about show of the day.
At 10:30pm the comedy stylings of Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns in Cardinal Burns brought in 354,000 viewers, with the carnival of wrong attracting a 3% 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.
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