Educating Yorkshire’s teary finale wins 9pm slot for C4
Refreshingly, Thursday night saw the schedules balance its ‘reality’ output with a sprinkling of good old fashioned scripted drama, but in the end the nation swung in one particular direction.
Channel 4 continued to excel in a genre it has really made its own – the cheap, voyeuristic type of shows that just slap a few cameras on the wall, zoom in on the most media-friendly personalities (the chronically brash and deluded) and sit back to watch the ‘magic’ happen.
Recently chicken shops, maternity wards, emergency services and even plebs’ living rooms have all been giving the CCTV treatment, providing the nation an outlet to meditate on their own condition while providing Channel 4 an hour of prime time filler.
But if these widely accessible locales didn’t offer enough titillation for the masses, last week was the premier episode of Up All Night (10pm) – a documentary series that ‘sheds an intimate light on life after dark in some of Britain’s more hidden locations’. Which basically sounds like the type of activity that would get a normal person attached to an ankle monitor.
After a little over 1 million viewers tuned in to see alcohol fuelled morons slide around in their own sick in last week’s The Nightclub Toilet, last night gave the UK’s audience a chance to catch up with the thrilling goings on in a Norwich mini cab office.
The real life roller-coaster drama about the everyday vignettes very nearly repeated last week’s performance and fell just below 1 million viewers. This, along with a 6% share, would indicate that Channel 4’s lack of imagination is paying off.
An hour earlier on the same channel, there was another hour of passive peeping but this time with young school children! After eight weeks the emotionally manipulative divisive documentary, that swears it has something important to say, came to an end as Educating Yorkshire (9pm) closed its doors for the term.
Filmed over seven weeks, it seemed that headmaster Jonny Mitchell had had his fill of time in the limelight, but not before launching his vulnerable pupils into the public domain. Last night’s episode dealt with a nervous young man with a stammer, who was surely comforted knowing that his precious school days were being broadcast to the nation as entertainment.
The grand finale – which borrowed some major theatrics from Sister Act – was down 226,000 viewers from the first episode at the start of September but still secured Channel 4’s biggest audience of the day, bringing in a total of 2.6 million viewers (a 12% share).
This was the biggest audience for the 9pm slot, indicating that audiences’ appetite for altered reality are as strong as ever with viewers taking to Twitter to talk about the show. During it’s running time Educating Yorkshire generated 95,473 tweets, the most out of any of yesterday’s shows.
Meanwhile, both ITV and BBC One provided some prime time drama. The third episode of Truckers (BBC One, 9pm) – the novelty drama about normal working folk – focused on feckless Steven facing up to his responsibilities. Three weeks ago, the earthy series started out with an audience of 2.9 million, falling to last night’s 2.3 million viewers and an 11% share.
ITV didn’t fare much better with the third episode of lavish 60s-set gynaecology drama Breathless. 2.1 million viewers watched as Jack Davenport raked his way through the odd lady garden or two before seeking out an extra marital affair with a glamorous woman from his past – as is standard in period drama. The on-going moral grey areas of his illegal abortion activities secured a 10% share.
At the same time in the netherworld of BBC Two plucky reporter Anita Rani was off to Japan to study the behaviour of the super geek and how their (non) sexual activities could have huge repercussions on the future of the country in No Sex Please, We’re Japanese (9pm).
1.8 million viewers watched as grown men spent more and more time in virtual worlds, resulting in the birth rate dropping dramatically. The bizarre blip in the world’s birth rates brought in an 8% share.
Earlier at 8pm, children who actually chose to be exploited by broadcasters littered the set of Waterloo Road (BBC One). Almost as dependably popular as Holby-set programmes, the school drama was watched by 3 million viewers and a 14% share.
A little earlier the battle of the soaps came in the form of a single episode of EastEnders (BBC One, 7:30pm) and two separate slices of Emmerdale (ITV, 7 and 8pm).
6.5 million viewers watched as Michael hatched a plan to get rid of Janine in EastEnders, a difficult task considering that the Queen Vic’s basement, the canal and allotments are far too obvious a burial site. The devious plotting, which might or might not run until Christmas Day, secured a 31% share and the day’s second biggest audience.
Emmerdale also had no qualms about slowly turning into a crime drama as Vanessa removed a bullet from Cain’s dubious mate’s shoulder on his kitchen table. There was some time set aside to nod to the past as long-running charcater Alan Turner passed away.
6.9 million viewers tuned in at 7pm as the news of Alan (who was in the soap for over thirty years) passing reached the village. The first episode of the night secured Thursday’s biggest audience while the second episode secured 6.2 million viewers.
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.