A peak of 4.9m watch England’s swimming victory on BBC One
Tuesday saw BBC One bring another full day of coverage from day six of the Commonwealth Games 2014 as England and Australia continued to battle it out for all those super shiny medals.
The first three-hour segment at 9am captured the attention of 866,000 viewers, followed by an average audience of 1.2 million tuning for an hour at 12 noon.
Naturally interest grew throughout the day, growing to 1.3 million at 1:15pm and to 1.4 million viewers for three hours from 3pm to see the Team GB male gymnast team divide and turn on each other, reminding us of the true spirit of the games.
Of course, it was the final three-hour block at 7pm that provided the day’s biggest Commonwealth audience, with an average audience of 4.1 million viewers (a 21% share) helping to secure the prestigious 9pm slot for BBC One.
The highest audience peak came at 9:15pm as England bagged some lovely gold medallions in the fun-sounding Men’s 4 x 100m Medley Relay swimming event, with 4.6 million and a 22% tuning in for that fifteen minute section.
A little earlier in the evening, ITV was reigning supreme with an entire hour of the latest action from the UK’s most unlikely rural community of Emmerdale (7pm).
Tuesday’s biggest audience tuned in for the tranquil goings on from the picturesque village, with police entrapments, drug raids, double crossing and a vengeful woman armed with pasta filling up an hour of quiet country life.
A little over 5 million tuned in to see new relationship enthusiast Katie get a bowl of spaghetti planted on her head, helping Emmerdale secure the number one spot with a 28% share.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the fictional soap universe, things weren’t going great for the residents of EastEnders (BBC Two, 8pm) although at least Tuesday saw the soap crawl its way back up to second place.
After being beaten into a corner with the one-two punch combination of the FIFA World Cup 2014 and now the Commonwealth Games 2014, the last thing the soap needed was to be hidden away in the dark corners of BBC Two.
It’s possible that there are some sections of the country that simple refuse to tune in to the Corporation’s second channel and are still suspicious of embracing the service 50 years after launch – there’s no other way to explain another lacklustre evening for EastEnders.
4.9 million viewers caught up with the latest trouble and strife from Albert Square as Carol Jackson went in for her big operation, netting a 25% share.
Up against the unrelenting misery was the perfect lightweight and cheery schedule filler on ITV. The latest episode of Love Your Garden (8pm) saw Alan Titchmarsh excitedly get his hands grubby by refreshing an overworked nurse’s forgotten area.
2.3 million tuned in for the feel-good makeover, translating into an 11% share.
At the same time on BBC Two, Holby City (8:30pm) brought in 3.4 million and a 17% share, while the ‘real life’ theatrics of Undercover Boss (9pm) provided Channel 4 with its biggest hit of the day with an audience of 1.3 million and a 6% share.
Perhaps exhausted from all the FIFA World Cup 2014 schedule-juggling, it seems recently that commercial broadcaster ITV has been happy to lay back and let BBC One take all the glory without really trying.
Last night brought yet another repeat, this time the second episode of the ‘let’s hound them with cameras from birth’ social documentary 56 Up (ITV, 9pm). An audience of 1.9 million viewers tuned in to see just how disappointing getting older can be, resulting in a 9% share.
At 10pm on Channel 4 the fourth episode of grim but very shiny Utopia provided the usual level of intrigue and violence mixed in with seriously morally troubling quandaries. The latest attempts to take down The Network and allow the human race to cannibalise itself took in 404,000 viewers and a 2% share.
The Social TV Analytics report is a daily leaderboard displaying the latest social TV analytics Twitter data from SecondSync. The table shows the top UK TV shows as they are mentioned on Twitter, which MediaTel has correlated with the BARB overnight programme ratings for those shows (only viewable to BARB subscribers).
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. Overnight data supplied by TRP are based on 15 minute slot averages. This may differ from tape checked figures, which are based on a programme’s actual start and end time.
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