Weekend of sporting action ends with Soccer Aid netting 3.9m
The past weekend brought a smorgasbord of ‘event’ live television in an effort to tempt viewers away from the unseasonally seasonal weather, with the return of the original modern reality show format, an over-abundance of sporting clashes and the end of an audience favourite all cluttering up the schedule.
On Friday evening, a day after Big Brother: Power Trip‘s (9pm) big live launch show, Channel 5 decided to do the unexpected and follow that with…yet another live launch show (apparently there’s no such thing as too much Big Brother on Channel 5).
The first live launch on Thursday night attracted an audience of just under 2 million viewers, but by the time Friday rolled around only 1.5 million viewers tuned in for another two hours of grating characters entering the house. The hoopla surrounding the six new housemates secured an 8% share for the channel.
The ‘outrageous’ characters and awkward entrance interviews helped Big Brother: Power Trip become the most tweeted about show of the day, generating 54,000 tweets.
It seemed the balmy weather had even affected Friday’s typical hits, with the top two shows of the day – both, excitingly enough, Coronation Street (ITV) – falling short of the usual expectations. 6.7 million viewers tuned in at 7:30pm to see street stalwart, Gail, reach new levels of low in her love life, with the audience falling to 6.3 million for the 8:30pm episode.
Saturday brought a dark day for ITV as its sure-fire hit, Britian’s Got Talent (ITV, 7pm), finally wrapped up after weeks of procrastination.
By the time 7pm came along, the TV watching nation was in a state of feverish anticipation as the eighth series finally came to the end. At this stage, the commercial broadcaster knows how to milk the golden cow, with the finale seeing the final 11(!) hopefuls take to the stage to remind us all of their skills.
The two and a half hour show was watched by an average audience of 10.2 million viewers (a 49% share) who tuned in to see yet another boyband (Collabro – their unique twist being that they sing awful operatic versions of Les Mis songs while looking like Take That around the time they mainly functioned as M&S suit models) crowned the winners.
The end of the extremely successful run captured the biggest audience over the entire weekend, producing 665,119 tweets during its broadcast, which translates to 65 tweets for every 1,000 viewers.
Straight afterwards football fans were given a taste of the World Cup as England faced off against Honduras at 9:30pm on ITV. Affected by some extremely stormy weather in Miami, which led to a forty minute delay, the International Football match still attracted a strong late night audience of 3.8 million viewers and a 26% share.
For a wee bit of Saturday night normality, BBC One offered up a predictable hour of Casualty at 9:20pm, netting 3.6 million viewers and a 16% share.
By Sunday, it seemed that TV audiences had been somewhat exhausted, with the biggest show of the day only managing a paltry 4.6 million viewers. Coverage of Formula 1: The Canadian Grand Prix kicked off at 6:15pm, disrupting BBC One’s usual schedule and sending dependable Sunday performer Countryfile‘s audience plummeting. While the two and a half hours of racing coverage garnered a 24% share and the day’s biggest audience, the rural magazine show was hit hard after airing earlier at 5pm.
Usually attracting audiences of 7 million viewers, yesterday only 2.4 million viewers joined Adam Henson and his lovely cattle down on the farm, translating to an 18% share.
Earlier over on ITV, the commercial broadcaster made a bit of a boo boo. Four hours into coverage of the French Open Tennis Live (1:30pm) and – crucially – minutes away from Rafael Nadal’s astonishing victory over Novak Djokovic , ITV decided to cut to some regional news as 1.6 million viewers swore at their telly in absolute horror.
The extremely unsatisfying climax to the tennis marathon still managed to capture an average share of 13%.
A little later on the same channel, those lovely celebrities were back on our screens to help the less fabulous achieve something with their lives on Soccer Aid 2014 (ITV, 6pm). An audience of 3.9 million viewers tuned in to see some famous faces (you know Jonathan Wilkes, right?) represent England while some slightly more famous faces (Gordon Ramsey, that guy from Avatar) led the Rest of the World team.
Not only did the star-studded spectacular net a 20% share but the easy-to-scoff-at three and a half hour event actually raised £4 million for charity.
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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