Viewers Run From BBC’s World Athletics Coverage

Lack of interest in BBC1’s extensive coverage of last week’s World Athletics Championships caused the channel to suffer its worst ever share of peaktime viewing.

The BBC had hyped its live coverage of the world championships in France, which often lasted for more than two hours at a time, as the sporting event of the year. However, viewers were reaching for the remote control as some of Britain’s best athletes failed to perform.

Ratings reached their lowest level on Wednesday 27 August when the 7pm to 9.30pm broadcast, which saw El Guerrouj claim another 1,500 metres title, attracted just 3.4 million viewers and achieved a mere 16.6% share of the available audience.

The best performance BBC1 could muster was recorded on Tuesday 26 August when 5 million sports fans tuned in at 8pm to see Kelly Holmes win her controversial 800 metres silver medal. However, the following programmes failed to hit the mark and provided BBC1 with a lowest ever peaktime share of 23.4% of the available audience.

Reports claim that over the same seven day period ITV1 had a peaktime share of 30.3%. Meanwhile, multichannel broadcasters took 25.1% share of the available audience across August, beating BBC1’s share for the first time.

Commenting on the figures, a BBC Sport spokesperson said: “Audiences like to see British athletes winning and this year’s medal haul was not great. There were also fewer household names competing, such as Paula Radcliffe.”

However, the Corporation defended its decision to cover the event so extensively and insisted it would not reconsider plans to devote up to 300 hours of programming to next year’s Olympic games. A spokesperson said: “It’s absolutely the role of the BBC.”

The BBC recently moved to silence those that have criticised its commitment to public service broadcasting, with the launch of a £220 million season of historical programming on BBC1 this autumn (see BBC Travels Back In Time With £220m Autumn Schedule).

BBC: 020 8743 8000 www.bbc.co.uk

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