Channel 4’s agro doc The Complainers jumps by 41% in 3 weeks
Just when viewers thought it was safe to return to BBC One’s prime time content, last night saw John Torode and Gregg Wallace once again rear their uniquely expressive heads for a brand new series of Celebrity MasterChef (9pm).
Only four short weeks after the tenth series of the revived version finally wrapped up (a relentless 24 inescapable episodes), the dynamic culinary duo were back to cast judgement and sassy critical sound bites to the famous and the beautiful.
Matched only by Casualty in its unique ability to bring in viewer’s year after year, despite little changes to the format, Tuesday night’s opening episode was watched by 4.4 million, which was noticeably lower than the 5.4 million that watched the final episode of the civilian MasterChef last month.
The biggest audience in the 9pm slot tuned in to see Mark from EastEnders, Russell Grant and Trinny’s other half, Susannah, confirm to the nation that they’re still kicking about, resulting in a 22% share.
Over on BBC Two, the third and final odd exposé/chummy tour guide hybrid, Welcome to Rio (9pm) took viewers through Rio de Janeiro’s apparently cheerful slums. An audience of 1.8 million viewers tuned in to see how the residents use their resources to thrive, bringing in a 9% share in the process.
As the feverish anticipation for tomorrow’s first World Cup game builds up, the last slice of Welcome to Rio managed to secure its biggest audience yet (episode one and two managed 1.6 million and 1.3 million viewers, respectively).
At the same time, Channel 4 had to wrap-up its own thrilling three-part documentary, with The Complainers (9pm) hopefully hanging up their strongly worded letters for good.
The show, about those people in life that just like a good old moan at some underpaid office worker’s expense, sometimes just to fight off loneliness, spent its final hour taking a shot at the energy giants.
An audience of 1.2 million viewers decided to spend their Tuesday night in the company of the stress spreaders, resulting in a 6% share.
Going in an opposing trajectory from BBC Two’s rival doc, The Complainers has actually increased its audience each week, up from the first episode’s 857,000 viewers, representing a 41% jump. The antagonising action also helped the show generate the fourth highest amount of tweets for Tuesday.
On Channel 5, the 14th series of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (9pm) continued, securing the broadcaster’s biggest audience of the day with 1.2 million viewers.
Meanwhile, ITV took it easy, stuffing its evening schedule with a repeat of Endeavour (8pm) from April 2013. The two hour mystery saw the young Inspector Morse go head to head with a fellow opera lover – who just happened to like slaughtering the innocent as well.
An audience of 2.4 million viewers and a 12% share tuned in for the second episode of the first series.
Over on BBC One, Holby City (8pm) continued to trundle out storylines and netted a standard audience of 4 million viewers (a 20% share), while Springwatch 2014 (8pm) provided BBC Two’s biggest hit of the day with 2.3 million viewers and a 12% share.
As the summer has been getting into full swing, viewers have been distracted by outside, real-world events with the soaps being noticeably affected. Surprisingly, it was rural soap Emmerdale (7pm) which managed to become the day’s biggest hit, despite not doing very well at all.
The hour-long trip to the UK’s dodgiest village focused on the trial of teenage BFF-slayer Belle Dingle, featuring the usual array of dramatic outbursts and high emotion, and was watched by an average audience of 5.6 million viewers and a 30% share.
Over on BBC One, the visit to EastEnders (7:30pm) was hijacked by the second half of Emmerdale, with the London soap coming out of the battle a little worse for wear.
Just 4.5 million viewers tuned in for the BBC’s brand of manufactured misery as Max Branning’s secret came pouring out, netting a lowly 23% share for the recently revitalised soap.
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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