New World’s audience on Channel 4 shrivels even further
Last night BBC Two brought viewers on a tempestuous trip down broadcasting memory lane, navigating them safely through severely bruised egos, airborne glasses of wine and intense daybreak ratings warfare between the BBC and ITV in recent history.
The Battle for Britain’s Breakfast (9pm) took a detailed look back at the launch of TV-am in February 1983 and the BBC’s reactionary and seriously underhanded pre-emptive strike with Breakfast Time managing to launch two weeks earlier.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the superstar line up of ‘The Famous Five’ – top shelf presenters of the day who were not only the face of this new early morning concept, but also invested and shaky shareholders – fell flat on its face for TV-am, with viewers finding David Frost’s gravitas and hard news agenda a little hard to digest before their Frosties.
In fact, BBC’s warm and fuzzy Breakfast Time managed to ‘out-ITV’ ITV, with Selina Scott and Frank Bough’s mixture of outrageously coy flirting and lighter-than-hydrogen news stories working their way into the nation’s heart like an antibiotic-resistant virus.
Last night BBC Two certainly lost the 9pm ratings battle, but 1 million viewers tuned in to see TV-am win the nasty conflict with a WMD more powerful than the already stellar combo of Parkinson, Frost, Rippon, Ford and Kee – a talking rat with a bit of a geezer attitude.
The sight of Roland Rat single handedly saved the sinking ship, and sharing the sofa with broadcasting luminaries secured a 5% share.
Meanwhile over on BBC One, the tones were a little greyer than the bright and garish knitwear on BBC Two, as DI Jimmy Perez kicked off the final case of Shetland‘s (9pm) second series.
The penultimate episode saw the islands’ most sullen authority figure work his way through some daddy issues as he had to return to his home isle to deal with yet another suspiciously expired resident.
The second series of the (extremely) Regional Detective Show ® opened with an audience of 5.2 million viewers back in mid-March, with the first part of the final story securing 4.4 million viewers last night. A 19% share wasn’t enough to win the 9pm slot, with Shetland‘s succumbing to the football on ITV.
Things were getting a little more drastic over on Channel 4 as the second episode of expensive historical epic, New Worlds (9pm) slipped even further than last week’s fairly deflated debut, with Channel 5 and BBC Three pulling in bigger audiences than The Devil’s Whore sequel.
Despite the presence of walking cat-nip for the ladies (and future Mr Christian Grey), Jamie Dornan, last week’s audience of 668,000 shrivelled to a problematic 411,000 viewers, with the Massachusetts-set historical drama managing just a 2% share.
Beating the 1860s-set drama was Channel 5’s considerably cheaper to produce Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away! at 9pm. The grim documentary about people taking material goods off poor families won over 1.5 million viewers and a 7% share.
Being trounced by Channel 5 is one thing, but for the second week in a row, recently axed digital channel BBC Three beat Channel 4 with some more factual content aimed at non-demanding viewers.
If the term ‘the real life David Brent’ doesn’t fill you with unease and fear then maybe you were one of the 979,000 people that welcomed back walking organic bag of cringe Nev Wilshire, CEO of The Call Centre (9pm).
The second series of the Wales-based show about cold calling and inappropriate bosses didn’t quite match up to the very first episode which brought in over 1 million viewers in June 2013, falling slightly to 979,000 and a 4% share. Not only that, the highly suspect view at a real working office was the third most tweeted about show of the night.
At 8pm Holby City (BBC One) was watched by 4.6 million viewers and a 20% share, while the grand finale of The Great British Sewing Bee (where they had to make a dress for the Queen, presumably) took in an sturdy 2.7 million viewers and a 12% share for BBC Two.
ITV’s evening schedule was clogged up with the Live UEFA Champions League with coverage starting at 7:30pm. The game between Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain kicked off at 7:45pm and was watched by an average audience of 5.2 million viewers.
Chelsea’s second half 2-0 victory helped the audience peak at 6.7 million in the final fifteen minutes, resulting in a peak share of 27% and the biggest show in the 9pm slot.
At 7pm, reliable teatime performer Emmerdale brought in 5.6 million viewers to ITV while EastEnders (7:30pm) followed shortly after on BBC One and won Tuesday’s biggest audience.
Over 6.6 million viewers tuned in to see Bianca Butcher end yet another awful relationship, securing a 32% 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