England’s World Cup defeat peaks at 15.4m on Saturday
With the weekend schedule cluttered with FIFA World Cup 2014 action, it was no surprise to see the much awaited début of the England team come out on top, even if the squad didn’t actually manage to defeat Italy.
An average audience of 7.3 million viewers tuned in to the 40 minute warm-up from 10:20pm on BBC One, jumping to 14.5 million at the 11pm kick off.
On Saturday night the game peaked at 11:30pm, with 15.4 million viewers watching around the time Italy’s Marchisio scored the first goal of the night, representing a whopping 76% share.
Earlier on over on ITV, the match between Uruguay and Costa Rica (7:30pm) helped the nation keep focused until the night’s main event, with 5.5 million viewers tuning in to see Costa Rica celebrate a 3-1 victory, bringing in a 29% share.
Naturally, many sore heads and lack of a patriotic focus saw Sunday’s football offerings fail to win over the nation’s collective interests in a similar fashion. ITV provided coverage of the Switzerland and Ecuador game at 4pm, bringing in an average audience of 3.7 million viewers and a 25% share.
Things improved slightly over on BBC One at 7:30pm as France battled Honduras at Estadio Beira-Rio. 7.6 million viewers stayed tuned for the entire coverage which saw the French team celebrate a 3-0 victory, with the audience peaking to 8.7 million viewers around 9:15pm.
At the same time ITV offered up an alternative to the football with a refreshing bout of scripted drama starring Paddy Considine and Olivia Coleman in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: The Murder at Angel Lane (8:30pm). The repeat of the two hour period drama from 2013 – the second in an ongoing but very spaced-out series – was watched by only 2 million people, resulting in a 10% share.
Over on Channel 4, the modern noir of Fargo (9pm) reached its penultimate episode with Martin Freeman’s Lester Nygaard continuing to bumble about, way over his head. The latest dark adventure of Minnesota kookiness captured a standard audience of 946,000 viewers and a 4% share.
Straight up afterwards was the first of many hurriedly bundled together documentaries looking at last month’s shootings in California by a British-born 22 year old called The Virgin Killer (Channel 4, 10pm).
The opportunist doc featured little insight into the killings but a lot of footage and online material left behind by perpetrator, presumably for this very purpose of achieving some kind of grim infamy. An audience of 565,000 viewers tuned in to peer into the dark recesses of a troubled soul, netting just a 35% share for the channel.
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