TV Overnights: Soaps Secures Prime Time Audience for ITV1

Monday’s television viewing was dominated with the usual mixture of soaps and reality shows, with ITV1 winning the battle for the nation’s remotes. The evening started off strong with Emmerdale, the soap about sleepy village life, grabbing 31% of the audience share for that time. A total of 7.6 million viewers tuned into see Jai and Charity postpone their wedding plans, including 370,000 people catching the events in HD.

Coronation Street continued the momentum, with 8.9 million viewers last night; securing the biggest audience of Monday night’s schedule. The soap, which featured the ever-reliable David Platt losing a very blond child in the metropolis of Weatherfield, managed an impressive audience share of 37%. Audience interest peaked in the second half with Corrie attracting a peak audience of 9.1 million viewers.

A further 542,000 people tuned into view the North’s most eventful street on ITV1 HD, giving Monday’s episode a combined total of 9.4 million.

The dependable pull of EastEnders broke the commercial channel’s run briefly, with documentary Little England managing a total of 3.5 million viewers at 8pm. This was BBC1’s largest audience share of the evening with the East End soap grabbing 34% and peaking at 6.7 million viewers.

BBC1’s fortune didn’t last too long with the I’m a Celebrity hijinks kicking off at 8:30pm. The reality show, presented by Ant and Dec, had an average audience of 8.42 million (including HD) over its 1.5 hour run. Interest peaked around 9pm at 9.4 million viewers (and an audience share of 36% across both versions of the channel). Viewers disappeared slightly towards the end as a total of 8 million people watched Jessica-Jane Clement, star of a Craig David music video, being sent on her way.

BBC1 had the biggest audience share at 10pm with BBC News at Ten grabbing 18.5% of available viewers.