Corrie’s Les Dennis dilemma nets Wednesday’s top audience
Wednesday brought another day of wall to wall coverage of the Commonwealth Games 2014 on the BBC, with Gregory Rutherford’s victory in the men’s long jump helping England push past old rivals Australia for the top spot.
An average audience of 1.2 million viewers tuned in to BBC Two at 6pm to see the 2012 Olympic champion take gold in the hour-long slot while BBC One was taking a Commonwealth break for the news.
Straight afterwards at 7pm, BBC One kicked off its coverage again with the last three-hour slot of competitive action. As usual Gary Lineker was rolled out to reflect on the seventh day of the event, securing an average audience of 3.8 million viewers and a 20% share – the game’s biggest audience of the day.
Elsewhere and outside the realm of unavoidable sporting events, life continued as usual with Wednesday’s biggest hit, Emmerdale (ITV, 7pm) slipping to second place and providing some essential rural high drama.
An audience of 4.7 million viewers tuned in to witness scenes of miniature psychopath Robbie learning that a tenner went missing from his home, with the shocking events helping bring in a 29% share.
Next up was Coronation Street‘s (ITV) solo outing of the day at 7:30pm, with yesterday’s trip to Weatherfield focusing on the latest difficulties faced by the UK’s unluckiest family, the Platts. Wednesday’s biggest audience watched as head matriarch Audrey called for one of those shouty family meetings which saw brain damaged restaurateur Nick go off on one.
A little under 6 million viewers tuned in to see the family voice their concern about Gail’s latest romantic entanglement and allowing Les Dennis into their lives (fair enough, really), securing the biggest hit of the day with a 33% share.
8pm brought the cheesy horror of All Star Mr & Mrs which saw Bianca’s bald bloke from EastEnders and some woman from forgotten 90s band Eternal battle it out for viewers’ respect. 3.3 million caught up with the Phillip Schofield-fronted fun, resulting in an 18% share.
Meanwhile there were sad times over on Channel 4 as Dawn O’Porter packed up her bag of dusty wares in the final episode of This Old Thing: The Vintage Clothes Show (8pm). 748,000 viewers watched as Dawn struggled to sell the very concept of the show to her latest victim, netting a 4% share.
At 9pm it was time to return to the harrowing scream-filled halls of Southmead Hospital maternity wing for One Born Every Minute (Channel 4). Last night’s cautionary tale focused on how the expecting parents fell in love, rather than the messiness that it leads to.
Channel 4’s biggest audience of the day, 1.2 million viewers, tuned in to hear soppy stories of young love, resulting in a 6% share.
At the same time, BBC Two’s 9pm slot was filled up with massive ungodly subterranean drilling machines as the story of The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway came to an end (just the TV show – lucky London commuters will have to wait a little while yet when the project will no doubt be delivered on time in 2018).
The concluding episode looked at how the teams kitted out the underground caverns to transform them into train stations of the future, with the unveiling of Canary Wharf’s newest station taking in an audience of 2.2 million viewers.
Meanwhile ITV’s schedulers continued their summer break, relying on yet another repeat to attract the masses. The second part of Inside Death Row with Trevor McDonald (9pm) saw the veteran broadcaster chit chat with inmates at Indiana State Prison and scored 1.8 million viewers and a 9% 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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