Pound Shop Wars enlists 5.4m souls on BBC One
Thursday night brought an evenly split audience to the nation’s two favourite channels, with one show in particular proving to be a surprise hit with viewers.
After a one-off episode in 2012, BBC One invited viewers back to the brutal and intense (no, not really) Pound Shop Wars (8pm), a new documentary series that continues to follow a family-run bargain store in sunny Wakefield.
And, yes, that dim scraping noise you could hear somewhere in the background has been confirmed by the BBC as the sound of its commissioning editors hitting the lower end of the creative barrel.
The first of four Pound Shop Wars – and the umpteenth observational workplace documentary to arrive on our screens recently – focused on the disturbingly upbeat workers (the kind that always pepper this particular genre of schedule-fodder) as they face a crisis.
A startling 5.4 million viewers tuned in to see the staff learn that a rival shop in East Ham had lowered prices below the £1 mark, kicking off a thrilling and tense half an hour of television and resulting in a 24% share.
At the same time, Channel 4’s bizarre and long-running human experiment, Supersize vs Superskinny (8pm) attracted 1.3 million viewers, while the second episode of Emmerdale pulled in 6.3 million viewers.
At 8:30pm on ITV, the unholy resurrection of Birds of a Feather continued as Sharon’s estranged husband, Chris Theodopolopodous, returned to the nation’s screens after 16 years to ask for a divorce. 5.3 million viewers (a 23% share) tuned in to see Doreen catch the eye of a blind man, leading to all kinds of ‘hilarious’ situations you thought had been left behind in the eighties.
A little earlier in the day, the first episode of Emmerdale (7pm) brought the day’s second biggest audience to ITV, with 7.1 million viewers catching up with the latest small town turmoil.
Half an hour later on BBC One, the residents of Albert Square were enjoying a usually glum Thursday night as Masood’s epic bout of spot-on drunkenness seemingly came to an end. The biggest audience of the day (7.6 million viewers) watched EastEnders as the intensely intoxicated former postman found out about Carol’s illness, resulting in a 35% share.
Next up on the never-ending carousel of passive crime drama was Inspector George Gently (BBC One, 8:30pm) who was back for a sixth series of easy-to-watch crime solving. The 1960s set police procedural saw the Inspector and his sidekick attempt to overcome the psychical and emotional trauma of the last series (lots of bullet wounds), locking in the biggest audience of the 9pm slot with a 23% share.
Over on ITV, the sixth series of Benidorm (9pm) continued to perform well as 4.9 million viewers tuned in to see an outbreak of toilet humour with a bout of diarrhoea spreading around the swimming pool, netting a 21% share.
At the same time, Channel 4 was busy being brave and breaking down social boundaries with Big Ballet (9pm) – an experiment to see if ‘bigger people’ have what it takes for the excruciating performance art. 901,000 viewers decided to find out the answer.
Even Channel 5 managed a bigger audience in the 9pm slot with its ‘reality’ offering, a tenth – yes tenth – series of The Hotel Inspector (9pm).
Last night’s adventure in abrasive personality clashes saw Alex Polizzi attempt to get a negative reaction out of mere plebs by behaving like a generally unpleasant human being. The first episode saw Alex popping to Liverpool to bark orders and be an extremely antagonistic hotel guest, capturing over 1 million viewers with her winning disposition.
10pm saw the return of Chris Lilley’s demonic spoilt teenager from the genius Summer Heights High over on BBC Three. Although only 414,000 viewers tuned in for the first episode of Ja’mie: Private School Girl, the comedian’s cult following were pretty vocal on Twitter.
During the broadcast there were 23,323 tweets generated – the second highest volume of the day. This meant that there was an impressive 56 tweets about Sydney’s over-achieving nightmare child for every 1,000 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. 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.