TV Overnights: TOWIE Christmas Special wins 1.1m for ITV2

ITV2’s The Only Way is Essex returned to our screens last night for a one-off Christmas Special. The hour-long show attracted more than 1.1 million viewers and an impressive 6.1% average audience share between 10pm and 11pm.

TOWIE‘s ratings pipped BBC Two’s final Life’s Too Short – the new Ricky Gervais series – which pulled in one million viewers and a 5.3% share at 10pm, as well as Channel 4’s Home for the Holidays (739,000 viewers) and Channel 5’s popular CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (875,000 viewers).

However, BBC News at Ten secured the highest ratings during the post 10pm slot with an average audience of 4.4 million viewers.

BBC One also dominated the majority of the pre-watershed ratings, with the exception of the 7pm to 7.30pm slot, which saw ITV1’s Emmerdale claim the top spot with 6.6 million viewers and a 30.1% share.

BBC One’s Eastenders banked a high of almost nine million viewers between 7.30pm and 8pm, before Holby City picked up 5.1 million peak viewers in the lead up to the peak-hour.

The third and final Young James Herriot achieved the peak ratings during the all-important 9pm to 10pm slot with 4.1 million average viewers and a 17.4% share.

At the same time, the new Comedy Annual drew in a peak audience of 2.4 million viewers for ITV1, while 1.8 million viewers tuned in to Channel 4 for Jamie’s Christmas with Bells On.

Meanwhile, BBC Two split its peak-hour schedule between Mock the Week and Rev, which secured 2.1 million and 1.5 million peak viewers 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 and key multi-channel stations.