ITV leads Thursday with I’m a Celeb and hour-long Emmerdale
Thursday night saw BBC One combine the unmitigated might of two of its best investigative minds for their prime time proposition.
Finally, after many years of hoping and praying, the patience of the TV audience across the land was finally rewarded with the coming together of fearless journalist/general tabloid personality, Matt Allwright and his lady counterpart, Julia Bradbury.
Keeping Britain Safe 24/7 (BBC One, 8pm) saw the courageous duo bravely profile bog-standard everyday heroes, such as firefighters, rail workers and midwives in a series of hard-hitting fluff pieces.
Each of the four shows – dedicated to those that keep the country ticking over – focuses on a particular season (for some random thematic reason), with last night’s opening episode focusing on Autumn.
Julia Bradbury, continuing her recent trend of popping up in the most random of programmes, managed to stroll around emergency call centres, hospital wards and helicopter pads all while giving her trademark piece-to-camera all without bumping into anything.
The late evening factual fun went head to head with ITV’s ratings juggernaut at 8:30pm resulting in only 2.2 million viewers watching as Julia and Matt fizzed with chemistry while reminding the nation that…actually, the point was kind of confused. Either way, it netted a 9% share.
Straight up afterwards at 9:30pm was a repeat of Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas special from December 2011. The early festive present for the many feverish fans saw Agnes desperately rallying her family together for the return of her prodigal son.
It may have been two years old but Mrs. Brown and her expected string of misunderstandings netted a 12% share and 2.8 million viewers.
There was no surprise over on ITV as its big player of the night once again came in the form of I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! as the series hurtled towards its conclusion. Last night’s festivities saw Alfonso Ribeiro plummet to the depths of despair after losing a challenge (it involved numbers and Joey Essex was his wing man – UH OH), only to win his pride back by spinning non-stop for twenty minutes.
The third last episode of the 13th series saw five lucky contestants treated to a hot tub, alcohol, some melted chocolate and strawberries. An audience of 8.5 million viewers tuned in to see Alfonso get his groove back shortly before himself and Rebecca Adlington got cast out of the jungle by spiteful fans.
An impressive 36% share ensured that Ant and Dec’s latest hour and a half of Australian entertainment secured the day’s biggest audience for ITV.
Meanwhile, Channel 4 were handing out unrealistic titbits on how to survive the economic fallout in Getting Rich in the Recession (9pm). The latest documentary from the broadcaster (other genres of programing are sometimes available) followed about a former car sales man as he made vast fortunes buying up vast quantities of any old tat (including fresh crab) – although there just might be more to it than that.
1.5 million viewers tuned in to learn the valuable secrets of success (hint: having a shed load of cash helps in the first place), netting channel 4’s biggest audience of the day and a 6% share.
Earlier on BBC One, EastEnders (BBC One, 8pm) fumbled a little bit in its latest (and mostly successful) campaign to overthrow its rural rival.
Thursday’s trip to the harmonious and prosperous borough of Walford saw resident ‘nice guy’ Alfie Moon realise that his reunion with his estranged street vending soul mate, Kat, came at a significant cost.
A low 6.8 million viewers tuned in to see Alfie learn that his newly cemented family were going to have the Queen Vic taken off their hands due to reigning villain Phil Mitchell’s warped sense of justice. Last night’s half an hour of miserable and quarrelsome mockensy secured a 31% share for BBC One.
An hour earlier, viewers got a chance to escape to the equally charming and peaceful village of Emmerdale (ITV, 7pm) for an entire hour of small town violence and intimidation. A little over 7 million viewers watched as the village’s latest clan – the Barton’s – made their mark on rural life, resulting in a surprising amount of blood for tea time viewers.
The latest chaos from the Dales netted the day’s second biggest audience of the day and a 34% share.
EastEnders‘ poor performance opened the door for commercial broadcaster ITV to take the prize for the top two programmes of the day although BBC One took seven spots in the top ten.
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.