Jade Goody pulls in Living’s largest ever audience

The controversial reality programme following the plight of Big Brother star Jade Goody, who is suffering from terminal cancer, helped Living gain its largest ever audience last night with a total of 929,000 viewers.

The hour-long programme simply named Jade, which has been heavily debated in the press this week following claims that the channel planned to film Goody’s death, pulled in 709,000 viewers at 9pm and then a further 220,000 on Living+1 – the show pushed the channel’s ratings up by an incredible 366% compared to its slot average of 152,000 viewers.

Elsewhere, ITV1’s new Billy Connolly show – Journey to the Edge of the World – attracted the highest ratings of the terrestrial channels with more than 4.8 million peak viewers and a 20.2% average audience share between 9pm and 10pm.

BBC One’s popular drama New Tricks came a close second with 4 million viewers and a 17.1% share, while BBC Two’s Natural World pulled in 1.7 million viewers and a 7.3% share.

At the same time, Channel 4’s Cutting Edge documentary, ‘Britain’s Conjoined Twins: Hope and Faith’, attracted 1.4 million average viewers and Five’s Ice Road Truckers picked up 1.2 million.

However, the soaps banked the highest ratings of the evening as usual, with BBC One’s Eastenders holding the top spot over ITV1’s Emmerdale – Eastenders peaked with 8.9 million viewers and a 39.3% average audience share between 7.30pm and 8pm.

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.

BBC: 020 8743 8000 www.bbc.co.uk ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com Five: 020 7550 5555 www.five.tv Channel Four: 020 7396 4444 www.channel4.com