Liverpool’s victory on ITV defeats Dimbleby’s BBC debate
Tuesday night saw David Dimbleby enter the tense atmosphere of the Scottish independence debate as the veteran broadcaster sat down with a little chit chat with leading figures from opposing sides.
Scotland Decides: The Dimbleby Interviews (9pm) brought together pre-recorded interviews with Alex Salmond and Gordon Brown (never in the same room at the same time, naturally) as Dimbleby tackled the tough questions, apparently with a predetermined mission to show how neutral the BBC was about the whole thing.
An audience of 2.1 million viewers tuned in to see Gordon Brown’s knee-jerk patronising tone take control while Alex Salmond’s idealism came across as a little concerning. With the referendum itself just around the corner, the extremely important prime time debate only scored an 11% share and was beaten by a football match over on ITV.
Even more concerning was the fact that sister channel BBC Two also trounced the significant deliberation with the second of a four-part documentary about a busy road. The exact same audience that caught up with the opening episode of The Motorway: Life in the Fast Lane (9pm) returned for a second helping of tarmac excitement, resulting in a 12% share.
Over on Channel 5, the fourteenth series of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (9pm) continued despite not taking the hint after two of its spin-offs had been given the chop after a nine and ten year run.
Last night saw the now Ted Danson-led team of cartoon characters deal with a killer that was murdering people in chess-related ways, confirming the fact that this is the States’ answer to Midsomer Murders.
A total of 1.3 million viewers tuned in to see the bonkers tale play out, bringing in the channels biggest audience of the day and a 6% share.
At the same time was Don’t Stop the Music (9pm) on Channel 4, a show that sounds like a Saturday night cheesy ITV game show, but isn’t.
The second and concluding part of the let’s-get-kids-playing documentary saw a classical pianist attempt to get support for his ‘instrument amnesty’ programme by inundating politicians with the kids awful playing.
Only 379,000 people and a 25% share watched the rousing finale, down from last week’s audience of 443,000 viewers.
Earlier at 8pm, Holby City (BBC One) netted a strong audience of 4.1 million viewers and a 20% share as the never-ending show continued.
Earlier in the evening, 5.2 million viewers tuned in to ITV for the latest episode of Emmerdale at 7pm, with Megan’s latest public bust-up netting a 30% share.
EastEnders (7:30pm) was up next over on BBC One, clashing directly with the opening of ITV’s evening-long coverage of the latest Live UEFA Champions League (7:30pm) game.
Kicking off properly at 7:45pm, the game saw Liverpool face off against Bulgarian’s Ludogorets Razgrad at Anfield. An average audience of 3.7 million viewers, with two goals in the 90th minute helping secure the 9pm slot for ITV.
Last night’s portion of fictional East End life saw Alfie Moon come to the sound conclusion that setting his house on fire might have been his worst get-rich quick idea yet. An audience of 6.4 million viewers tuned in to see disturbing scenes and to find out whether wife Kat was destined for the Walford graveyard, netting Tuesday’s biggest audience and a 33% 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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