End of Commonwealth Games sees BBC One dominate the weekend
As expected, the Commonwealth Games 2014 (BBC One) dominated the weekend schedules as the successful tournament came to an end after 11 eventful days.
Before yesterday’s closing ceremony, Saturday brought the final full day of competition with audiences hovering between the 1-2 million mark throughout the daytime coverage.
But it was the evening coverage that kicked off at 7pm on BBC One that resulted in the day’s biggest audience. Hazel Irvine and Gary Lineker were on hand for the penultimate night of the event, bringing a total of nine finals to an average audience of 5.4 million viewers, with the three hours of coverage netting a 29% share.
Outside of the sporting arenas, Saturday’s TV line-up was left lacking in exciting content. Obviously at peace with the fact that a combination of good weather and a distracting sporting event, rival broadcasters made minimal effort to bring home the masses.
To highlight what they were up against, Saturday’s league table saw a variety of news programmes on BBC One take the day’s second, third and fourth places.
The highest rated non-sporting/news programme of the day was a celebrity edition of the Ben Sheppard-fronted game show, Tipping Point, based around the archaic arcade coin-pusher machine… which says it all really.
The excitement of seeing the rich and famous (Vic Reeves and Martine McCutcheon) excitedly willing on coins to fall helped Tipping Point: Lucky Stars (ITV, 7:30pm) secure 2.3 million viewers.
Straight afterwards, and in a very same lame vein, was All Star Family Fortunes (ITV, 8:30pm) which saw a young lady on day release from the Weatherfield compound and a boxer drag their families on TV for a wee bit of exposure, securing another 2.3 million viewers.
Both ITV and Channel 4 offered up films in the prime time spot, with ITV completing the Star Wars prequel trilogy with what was probably the best one *faint praise*.
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (9:30pm) offered up scenes of that whining teenager, Anakin getting destroyed in a fight leading to his rebirth as Darth Vader – but because it’s been on ITV2 for what feels like every weekend for the past five years, only 1 million viewers and a 6% share joined the adventure.
Over on Channel 4, slightly crasser fayre was on offer with the film version of an E4 comedy hit, The Inbetweeners Movie (9pm), which secured 1.4 million viewers and an 8% share.
Sunday didn’t bring a drastic change from the recent status quo, with BBC One securing the largest audience share for the entire day. The channel’s mixture of the major sporting events and traditional Sunday shows made sure that it held most of the TV watching nation’s attention.
7pm brought the 1274th episode of Countryfile (BBC One) which saw the gang head down to Cornwall for a spot of crab fishing, some fun with explosives and a test drive on combine harvester. The rural escapism was watched by 5.7 million viewers and a 32% share.
Afterwards, there were sixty minutes of reflection on Commonwealth Games 2014: Review (8pm) which looked back at the 11 days of impressive achievements and shiny medals. 5.1 million viewers tuned in to be reminded that England beat closest rivals Australia, while securing a 25% share.
But of course yesterday’s main event came in the form of Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony at 9pm, an affair notably much less mental than John Barrowman’s bombastic introduction way back on 23 July.
An average audience of 6.8 million viewers tuned in to see Glasgow native Kylie Ann Minogue entertain the masses with a little help from her erratic mother, Lulu.
The mixture of bagpipes and Waltzing Matilda saw the unofficial opening ceremony for the Gold Coast Games in 2018 annoy many on Twitter (an easy thing to do, apparently), resulting in a 34% share. And not a giant tea cake in sight.
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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