Kay Mellor’s new lady drama In The Club secures 9pm slot
Tuesday night saw BBC One deliver the perfect prime time antidote to that specific demographic that have had their fill of sweaty footballers and pirouetting athletes, as Kay Mellor’s latest female-led drama In the Club (9pm) kicked off.
Following well-received dramas such as Fat Friends, Playing the Field and most recently the lotto-winning sob story The Syndicate, Mellor’s latest offering upped the oestrogensn levels by focusing on a group of women brought together by one simple fact – they’re all up the duff.
Of course it wasn’t long before life offered up even more dramatic obstacles for the heavily pregnant women to hurdle over, with a cast of familiar faces fleshing out the flustered characters.
The opening episode of In The Club secured the biggest non-soap or news audience of the day, with a little under 4 million viewers tuning in to see The IT Crowd‘s Katherine Parkinson, Spook‘s Hermione Norris and Coronation Street‘s Shobna Gulati all waddling around in their prop bumps.
Mellor’s usual mixture of comedy and high drama secured the 9pm slot with a 19% share.
An hour earlier, the latest shift in the corridors of Holby City (8pm) was watched by 3.9 million viewers and a 20% share – the biggest 8pm audience – but it wasn’t all plain sailing for BBC One yesterday evening.
While the later dramas soared, poor old EastEnders (BBC One, 7:30pm) took one for the team and went head-to-head with the second half of an hour-long Emmerdale (ITV, 7pm).
Tuesday’s trip to the rural idyll saw teenager lovers Belle and Sean call it a day, which wouldn’t be such a big deal if Belle Dingle hadn’t actually accidently slain her best mate in a moment of jealousy to win the boy’s heart.
Yesterday’s biggest audience watched the small community live out the usual big drama, bringing in an audience of 5.4 million and a 30% share.
While yesterday’s biggest player didn’t actually have that impressive an audience, it was much worse for the residents of Walford. A little over 4 million viewers tuned in for the action packed episode of EastEnders which saw Danny Dyer’s Mick Carter go for a swim, with the soap-clash resulting in a 21% share.
While BBC One focused on drama last night, commercial rival ITV went down the factual route, offering up a plethora of real-life stories. At 8pm, Alan Titchmarsh and his crew of gardening do-gooders were brightening up some deserving family’s back area with the latest episode of Love Your Garden securing 3.4 million and a 17% share.
9pm brought a slightly starker angle to the world of reality TV as The Walking Dead‘s David Morrissey narrated his way through the corridors of Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Indiana for sixty minutes of Kids Behind Bars (ITV).
2.8 million viewers tuned in to gawp at the minute serial killers and rapists while making a case for some kind of rehabilitation reform, with the documentary netting a 13% share.
Over on Channel 4 it was time for the latest transparent exercise in desperate PR in Undercover Boss (9pm), with this week’s episode seeing the head of a pharmacy chain attempting to make his company look all caring and cuddly. An audience of 1.1 million tuned in for the charm offensive, resulting in a 5% share.
Straight up afterwards, critically acclaimed dystopian drama Utopia saw its audience plummet all the way down to 307,000 viewers after hovering around the half million mark for the first four weeks – presumably it’s a hit over on 4oD.
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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