Robin Williams tribute results in Sky One’s biggest hit
Tuesday night brought some opportunistic scheduling for Sky One, who in the wake of comedy legend Robin Williams’ death moved heaven and earth (well, a double bill of Modern Family, An Idiot Abroad 2 and Glee) to air a fitting family-friendly tribute.
Ever the chancers, Sky One’s broadcast of the surprisingly dark children’s film from 1995, Jumanji (8pm), an entertaining artefact from the early days of odd looking post-Jurassic Park computer-generated creature filmmaking.
While only 407,000 viewers tuned in for the tale of a sad man-child literally trapped inside a board game, this represented a huge spike in the channel’s audience, with the Joe Johnston-directed blockbuster netting a 2% share and resulting in the channel’s biggest hit of the day.
Straight afterwards at 10pm was 1990 drama Awakenings, which got its stars best actor awards, with Robert DeNiro bagging the Oscar and Robin Williams picking up a Golden Globe.
The true story about Williams’ neurological medical pioneer was watched by 142,000 viewers and a 1% share.
Later at 9pm, BBC One gave us the second episode of Kay Mellor’s pregnancy drama, In The Club. Last night’s third trimester trauma focused on Jill Halfpenny and Will Mellor’s characters, with giving birth the least of their worries.
The biggest audience in the 9pm slot (4.3 million viewers) tuned in for the big-bump action, netting a 20% share.
There was a complete change of pace over on ITV with Executed (9pm), a sobering documentary detailing capital punishment in the UK. 2 million viewers (a 10% share) tuned in to hear the tales of the last men executed by the government, with some seriously questionable verdicts helping to bring an end to the practice.
Over on Channel 4, it was time for another image-tarnished company to get a free ride of the caring, loveable and calculating PR machine that is Undercover Boss (9pm). In fairness to last night’s slice of clandestine colleague snooping, the organisation in question had – for once – a worthwhile cause to get passionate about.
An audience of just over 1 million viewers tuned in to see the senior director of youth charity YMCA, with the street-level interactions and eye-opening tales netting a 5% share and Channel 4’s biggest audience of the day.
Straight afterwards was the grand finale of the hyper-hued, menacing conspiracy drama Utopia (Channel 4, 10pm), a critically acclaimed series that has seriously struggled to pick up a live audience.
Despite an obvious marketing presence at the start of the summer, the second series of Channel 4’s graphic-novel-come-to-life opened up with over half a million viewers five weeks ago with an impressive and typically visually stunning 70s-set prequel.
Last night’s eventful slice of primary colour paranoia saw our gang of outlaws race to stop the intentional outbreak of ‘Russian flu’ but by last night the audience had whittled away to just 311,000 and a 5% share, leaving a third series (and the future of humanity) in doubt.
Much less nerve-racking, but just as dramatic, was the first of the day’s big soaps. Emmerdale (ITV) got things started at 7pm, with the latest cow pat-scented romances netting 5.5 million and an impressive 31% share.
But it was EastEnders that proved to be Tuesday night’s top dog at 7:30pm on BBC One. 5.7 million viewers watched as Ian Beale got his ‘pained mourning face’ back off the shelf as the family held a police appeal to catch Lucy’s murderer.
The latest chapter in the long-running storyline also netted a 31% 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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