BBC1 Cleans Up On Christmas Day

As is traditional at the time of year, Christmas Day TV saw BBC1 taking a decidedly larger portion of the viewing pie than its commercial rival, ITV. This year BBC1’s festive offerings drew in almost 70% of the top ten Christmas Day programmes in terms of audience size. The remaining slots in the chart went to ITV’s Coronation Street, You’ve Been Framed and Emmerdale.

Also fast-becoming traditional at this time of year is violence and high-drama in the audience-grabbing soaps. Chart-topping EastEnders saw Tiffany on her deathbed, whilst over in Emmerdale there was a post-office shoot-out. Coro opted for a spot of wife battering to whisk up tension. The BBC’s comedy staples, Men Behaving Badly and They Think It’s All Over also did the trick nicely for the Corporation coming in second and fourth in the chart respectively.

Seven of the top ten programmes went to BBC1, with the evening edition of EastEnders drawing 15 million viewers according to consolidated BARB figures (this excludes viewers who tuned in to the repeat of the programme on Sunday). The end result looks like this:

However, ITV last night hit back, claiming its best Sunday evening performance since last February. According to unofficial overnight data, 17.6 million viewers (62% of available audience) tuned into witness the death of Alf Roberts in Coronation Street. Also, the Network’s new gameshow, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? saw a contestant reach and lose £64,000, the highest stake in the series so far.

ITV says that its overall peaktime share last night was 50.4%, compared with 25.2% for BBC1. ITV chief executive, Richard Eyre, has set the Network the target of claiming an average of 38% of peaktime viewing this year, rising to 40% by 2000. The loss of the News At Ten is expected to expedite this.

Subscribers can access the Television database by selecting “Television” from the drop-down box at the top of this page.