Slow-burning EastEnders mystery proving a hit for BBC One
Last night’s prime time schedule was awash with factual programming, ranging from the lighter-than-Hydrogen-filled-Malteasers offerings of BBC One, the manipulative melodrama dressed up as ‘serious’ broadcasting on ITV and the stark horror of reality on BBC Two.
MasterChef kicked off BBC One’s late evening schedule at 8pm, and despite being told repeatedly that the show had entered the ‘exciting’ end game, with the contestants having been shrunken down to the final 60, it simply looked like business as usual.
Just like the previous 16 episodes in the tenth series, five hopefuls squared up to each other in the kitchen, netting an average audience of 4.4 million viewers and a 20% share.
Next up was a documentary that – for some mad reason – was the most watched show in its time lost for the past two weeks, with last night being no exception. Parking Mad, a show completely made up of people quibbling about parking issues…and that’s about it.
An audience of 4 million people tuned in to see people all across the country voice their utter outrage over different aspects of the car-parking battle that is apparently being waged in streets across the nation. An audience share of 18% was enough for the thrilling slice of real life to secure the 9pm slot for the third week in a row.
Which really doesn’t bode well for the option on the other side. 9pm on ITV saw Nicky Campbell return for the second episode of Wanted: A Family of My Own, in which the broadcaster turned his sombre tone all the way up to ‘serious broadcaster expression’ attempting empathy and sympathy like a real human.
2.2 million viewers tuned in for the latest look at the difficult process of adoption, netting a lowly 11% share for the 9pm slot.
Just in case Wednesday night’s Panorama (in which the show took a traumatising look at the standard of care received by the nation’s elderly) wasn’t painful enough, last night gave viewers the chance to relive all those painful emotions in the final part of sobering BBC Two documentary Protecting Our Parents (9pm).
The third episode of the programme, that focuses on the aspects of old age that we would happily just ignore, highlighted the issues related to the shortage of places in care homes and featured some distressing scenes.
Over on Channel 4 at 8pm it was time to catch up with the 100% and not-at-all-staged goings on with James Constantinou and his dubious Prestige Pawnbrokers business. The third episode of Posh Pawn (after a one-off last year) was watched by 1.5 million viewers and a 7% share.
Up afterwards, at 9pm was dome-headed wannabe oddity, Heston Blumenthal, was back for a brand new series that made about as much sense as every other show he’s done.
Heston’s Great British Food saw the chef ‘delve into the history of iconic British dishes’ which equated to his usual attempts at weirding people out with silly concoctions. An audience of just over 1 million viewers tuned in to see Heston attempt to change the molecular properties of mash, just to be different. Sounds delish.
Earlier in the day the first of two Emmerdale‘s (ITV) kicked off the teatime soap action, with the first episode at 7pm securing an audience of 6.1 million viewers. This fell to 5.6 million for the second visit at 8pm, resulting in the second and third biggest shows of the day, respectively.
But it was the Broadchurch-esqe drama in Walford that became Thursday’s most watched show, as friends and family of Lucy Beale slowly started to uncover the truth about her life before her demise.
7.2 million people watched as Ian Beale was told that the investigation into his daughter’s death was now a murder inquiry (not to worry, he didn’t cry – we’ve been through the worst of it now). The latest episode, in what has been a very strong recent run for EastEnders, brought in a 36% share and was the third most tweeted about show of the day.
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.