Emmerdale takes top spot with just 5m while World Cup cools
Thursday saw BBC Two get a head start on its sporting rivals with that other tournament going on at the moment, with coverage of Wimbledon 2014 starting at 11:30am yesterday morning and running for an impressive nine hours.
An average audience of 926,000 tuned in for the entire event to see serial grunters Nadal, Federer and Serena Williams all come out on top in their singles matches, resulting in a 9% share.
Scheduled alongside BBC Two’s sprawling coverage was two hours and 45 minutes of matches and analysis over on BBC One at 1:45pm. The simultaneous ‘bite sized’ look at the live games brought in a larger average audience of 1.6 million viewers and a 24% share.
Straight up afterwards at 4:30pm, the BBC’s glaring HD cameras turned their attention away from South West London to somewhere far more exotic as the USA took on Germany in Arena Pernambuco in Recife.
The rain-soaked FIFA World Cup 2014 game kicked off at 5pm, with the entire coverage being watched by an average audience of a little over 4 million viewers. While the game actually resulted in a 1-0 victory to the German side, both Group G teams made it through to the next round, helping net a 29% share.
Towards the tail end of the game, ITV managed to air the first of two episodes of the nation’s third favourite soap Emmerdale at its normal time of 7pm. Last night’s double helping of small town drama had one of them big blow outs which saw a lot of characters shout at each other after some of those pesky dark family secrets all came flooding out.
While the 7pm episode didn’t exactly manage to bring in an impressive audience, 5 million viewers and a 28% share was enough to secure Thursday’s biggest audience. The second dollop of Emmerdale‘s brand of rural aggression at 8:30pm came in second place, with 4.4 million viewers and a lower share of 21%.
Over on BBC Two at 8:30pm, an exhausted Sue Barker was finally allowed to go home as John Inverdale brought out his highlight reel for Today at Wimbledon, attracting 1.8 million less dedicated viewers.
At the same time, it was ITV’s chance to bring the nation some sporting action, with the FIFA World Cup 2014 game between South Korea and Belgium in the Group H clash. 3.9 million viewers tuned in for the entire show which went out at 8:30pm, representing a 21% share. The game, which saw South Korea crash out of the competition, peaked in the first half hour with 4.9 million viewers.
At the same time on BBC One, sturdy doorstop of a show Holby City (8pm) took in 3.5 million viewers while George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces (8pm) was watched by 1.5 million viewers and a 7% share.
By the time the grand prime time slot came along the options were looking a little thin on the ground. The fifth episode in the latest run of Celebrity MasterChef (BBC One, 9pm) saw the usual array of semi-familiar faces (an ex-EastEnder, a former Leslie Ash, etc) cook for their lives, resulting in 3.5 million viewers and a 17% share.
Over on BBC Two, Business Boomers was trying to sneak in a bit of education as the Sandy Toksvig-voiced Open University show came back for a final episode beating viewers into submission with a torrid of facts while taking a peek behind the curtain to see how things really work. The fourth instalment, Hot Property, took a look at the county’s ‘brickonomics’ and secured 970,000 viewers and a 5% share.
Channel 4 brought viewers another questionable documentary, Beauty Queen or Bust (9pm), featuring one of the more staged set-ups in recent times. 750,000 viewers tuned in to see the tale of three desperate and down-on their-luck ladies as they competed for the Black Country heats of the Miss World competition.
The first of three episodes went to great pains to highlight that the heats were the last chance the women had at achieving anything in life (or else they’d ‘bust’ apparently) with the contrived nature of the show securing a 4% 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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