Red Nose Night Brings No Charity For BBC One’s Rivals

BBC One’s biannual decision to give over its evening schedule to charity fundraising resulted in Comic Relief: The Big One dominating Friday night’s viewing.

With comic sketches including Tony Blair tackling Catherine Tate’s unruly teenager Lauren, her foul mouthed Nan appearing on Deal Or No Deal, and another comic sing-a-long Peter Kay video, viewers choose to ignore the other main terrestrial channels.

The seven-and-a-half hour comedy extravaganza steadily built its audience for the initial three-hour period till the Ten O’Clock News. The first hour of the programme marginally lost out to ITV1’s soap hour combo of Emmerdale and Coronation Street.

Between 7pm and 7.30pm Emmerdale held 6.7 million adults, compared to around six million for the same period on BBC One. Coronation Street attained 7.9 million adult viewers during the 7.30pm to 8pm slot, while Comic Relief: The Big One had 6.3 million.

Comic Relief: The Big One then comfortably won the rest of the evening viewing, achieving an audience of at least eight million adults between 8pm and 10pm. Over on ITV1 a repeat showing of A Touch Of Frost had 3.7 million adults, around six million less than the same period on BBC One.

Channel 4 followed ITV1’s lead by not showing any original programming, instead deciding to air a triple-bill repeat of Ugly Betty. All three episodes performed badly, not reaching an audience of even one million. The best performing episode was between 10pm and 11pm, with 745,000 adult viewers. By way of contrast, last week’s edition of the popular US drama had around 2.1 million viewers.

Some relative successes could be found on BBC Two and Five. BBC Two’s documentary Moira Stuart In Search Of Wilberforce, about the life and work of abolitionist William Wilberforce, had a fairly respectable 1.8 million viewers.

Over on Five the double bill of US imports NCIS and Law And Order: Criminal Intent had an audience of 1.5 and 1.3 million respectively.

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.

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