TV Overnights: England’s Dutch match masters 8.2m viewers
Wednesday’s international friendly, England v Netherlands, scored the biggest audience of the night with an average audience of 6.5 million viewers. The game kicked off from Wembley at 8pm on ITV1 and, despite a 3-2 win to the Netherlands, secured a 28% audience share with 959,000 viewers watching the game in HD.
Viewer interest peaked half an hour after kick-off with 8.2 million viewers tuning in at 8:30pm, although the audience fell slightly as both teams failed to score in the first half of the game.
Before the game, at 7pm, Emmerdale brought an even higher share of the available audience to ITV1. 6.4 million viewers watched as Rhona’s proposal was ruined by Paddy (he had a few too many on a school night) resulting in an audience share of 30.5%.
Over on BBC One at 7:30pm new consumer series The Food Inspectors arrived into the world in surprisingly good health with 5.1 million viewers (a 24% audience share). The show, presented by Matt Allwright and Chris Hollins, was reminiscent their hard-hitting exposés from The One Show and followed food inspectors as they fought the war against the rise in counterfeit alcohol.
Afterwards, Waterloo Road went head-to-head with the England game and lost 800,000 viewers week on week. The school drama still brought in an audience share of 17% (4 million viewers).
The five remaining contestants in Masterchef (BBC One, 9pm) were put under yet more pressure as they were asked to cook a three course meal for food critics. The tenth episode of the series was watched by an average of 3.8 million viewers but peaked in the last fifteen minutes (4.3 million) as another hopeful was sent packing.
One Born Every Minute at 9pm on Channel 4 provided the broadcaster with its biggest audience of the day. 2.8 million viewers tuned in to see the latest real-life drama on the labour ward with a further 501,000 tuning in an hour later on Channel 4 +1.
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.