BBC One’s Happy Valley ends its bleak streak with 6.1m
Tuesday night brought the finale of writer Sally Wainwright’s latest successful drama Happy Valley (9pm), which once again secured the biggest audience in the prime time spot for BBC One.
The sixth and final episode of the crime drama set in the wild west of Yorkshire saw Sarah Lancashire’s Sargent Cawood attempting to get her life back on track after a long-running nemesis attempted to cave in her face a week earlier.
The tale of a tough single grandmother attempting to raise her late daughter’s child, while balancing the trials of everyday life with the personal horrors of her past, has secured a solid average audience of around 6 million viewers in the past five weeks.
Mix that with a chorus of critical approval and the street-level crime drama would seem shoe-in for a second series. Yesterday’s dramatic finale saw things go from bad to worse as the dangerous and deluded man Cawood blamed for her daughter’s death popped over to Happy Valley to kidnap her troubled grandson.
An audience of 6.2 million viewers watched as Sarah Lancashire pretty much secured her BAFTA next year by becoming a woman possessed as she did all she could to finally get some of that elusive justice.
While the title has been extremely inaccurate, if taken literally, the final moments did bring a brief moment of cathartic contentment, netting a 28% share,Tuesday’s biggest audience for BBC One and generating 19,635 tweets.
At the same time, BBC Two was also focusing on a drug-riddled town in need of a good shake up but unfortunately there was no sign of Sargent Cawood patrolling grimy shantytowns in Welcome to Rio (9pm).
The second episode of the frank documentary looked at everyday challenges facing the residents of Rio’s favelas, mixing the stark reality of major organised crime with suspiciously postcard-perfect scenes of poverty stricken children dancing happily in the streets.
Down from last week’s opening episode (which brought in 1.6 million viewers), an audience of 1.3 million people watched last night’s bizarre pre-World Cup travelogue/expose as violent raids and anti-Olympic demonstrations took place across the city, netting a 6% share.
Just to balance out the BBC’s dreary offerings, ITV was happy to provide a taste of a more traditional happiness at the same time. Coming just one day after Secret Life of Cats (which in itself was a more cuddly rip-off of BBC Two’s popular The Secret Life of the Cat) and last year’s The Secret Life of Dogs, last night saw the commercial broadcaster turn its attention to actual mini humans.
They’ve already covered pooches and moggies in the faux scientific show, so babies were always the next logical step, right? Secret Life of Babies (ITV, 9pm) showed exactly what babies get up to in their first two years (not a lot) and was watched by 2.6 million viewers and a 13% share.
At the same time on Channel 4 was the latest documentary about a terrifying look at those special members of society who float their boats by inundating institutions with serial complaints.
The second episode of The Complainers (9pm) introduced even more interesting characters who seem to get their jollies by targeting council staff and other public bodies with an onslaught of strongly worded letters, or whatever the modern equivalent is.
Last week an audience of 857,000 viewers decided to spend their Tuesday night in the company of the terminally unhappy. Shockingly this number rose last night, with a little over 1 million viewers tuning in to witness first hand two extremes of the condition.
Scenes of a man who has blitzed Kirkless Council with 10,000 complaints (he really should move if things are that bad) were inter-cut with a masked crusader in Cardiff out on his daily patrol, netting a 5% share for the channel.
Earlier in the day, fans of painfully awkward TV (of which there is a lot) were in for a big treat as charisma-vacuums Rio Ferdinand and Olly Murs ‘bounced off’ each other for an entire two hours while presenting World Cup’s 50 Greatest Moments (BBC Three, 7pm).
583,000 viewers braved the extremely ropey experience as Rio attempted to play the straight man to Olly’s oxygen deprived cheeky chappy.
At the same time on ITV, there was an entire uninterrupted (apart from those pesky ad breaks) hour-long episode of Emmerdale (7pm). 5.7 million viewers tuned in to see the show break the budget with a bit of skydiving fun, netting a 29% share.
The extended episode of the rural soap clashed with BBC One’s EastEnders, with bad results for the residents of Walford. Despite doing so well lately, a dismally small 4.9 million viewers watched as Tina Carter got herself properly inebriated (on a Tuesday!), resulting in a 24% share and the soap’s worst audience for some time.
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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