Jack’s Back To Defeat Cowell

Last night saw the return of high concept drama 24 to Sky One’s schedules, with CTU agent Jack Bauer returning from China to help save the US once again from terrorist threats.

The season’s opening double bill attracted an average adult audience of 624,000 and 557,000 for the first and second episode respectively.

This was comfortably ahead of ITV2’s repeat showing for the first two editions of music reality show American Idol, which had 386,000 adult viewers at 8pm and 275,000 for the 10pm showing.

Earlier in the evening a brand new episode of The Simpsons attracted nearly one millon adult viewers for Sky One, with 963,000 (and an average share of 6.3% in multichannel homes). This was around twice as many viewers than ITV2 managed to attract for the final thirty minutes of the Coronaton Street omnibus (453,000 for the period between 6.30pm and 7pm).

Saturday saw the return of the hugely popular ice-skating show Dancing On Ice, which helped ITV1 to dominate the early evening schedules. The two-hour extravaganza had an average audience of 7.8 million for its duraton, easily beating BBC One’s offering of Weakest Link: Pub Special and National Lottery: 1 vs 100. The show, which saw DJ Neil Fox voted off, attracted an average viewing share of 39.3% and peaked during the 15-minute period between 7.45pm and 8pm.

ITV1 also scored well with the return of Harry Hill’s TV Burp, with more than five million viewers, and Ant and Dec’s new gameshow, Pokerface, which was watched by 4.6 million.

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, ITV2 and Sky One.

Channel 4: 020 7396 4444 www.channel4.com BBC: 020 8743 8000 www.bbc.co.uk ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com