Sunday sees social drama combo The Village & The Mill shine
Despite the recent move to BBC One, Friday night proved that there was enough of The Great British Bake Off magic leftover, with even enough to spare to make up a little spin-off show for forgotten channel BBC Two.
9pm saw Jo Brand take the beloved concept and spin it off into an odd daytime chat show format, hoping to match – and even outshine – the creative heights reached by regarded contemporaries such as The Apprentice: You’re Fired! or that Strictly one were Zoe Ball gets excited about everything.
Despite the fact that Brand just basically showed ‘exclusive’ clips cut from the main show and satt down and nattered with the first reject, The Great British Bake Off: An Extra Slice (BBC Two) managed an audience of 2 million viewers and an 11% share.
Here’s hoping the BBC’s lucrative and precious ingredients can spread that bit thinner.
At the same time, BBC One aired a one-off police comedy, Walter, starring Adrian Dunbar, which despite the lukewarm reception attracted an audience of 2.7 million and a 14% share.
The latest evictee to be catapulted from Channel 5’s compound of shame on Big Brother: Live Eviction (9pm) helped bring in the broadcaster’s biggest audience of the day. 1.3 million viewers tuned in to see some self-obsessed and terminally obnoxious souls get all the attention they ever dreamt of heaped upon them.
Over on Channel 4 was the second episode of Alan Carr’s odd virtual heckling vocal contest, The Singer Takes It All (9pm). Unfortunately the second week of viewer app-based judgement didn’t improve of last week’s underwhelming ratings, resulting in 980,000 viewers (a 5% share) and generated the day’s fourth largest amount of tweets.
Saturday saw BBC One début a new light entertainment show that was more buoyant and floaty than the love child of the element hydrogen and a bag of Malteasers, as the Corporation took a page out of ITV’s Splash rulebook and unleashed Tumble (6:30pm) on to the world.
Featuring the usual array of needy celebrities, Tumble challenged the contestants to become gymnasts in a very similar fashion to the way Tom Daley made Joey Essex jump off a plank of wood.
The soft floor excitement of seeing the troubled one from Girls Aloud roll about the place took in 3.2 million viewers and a 21% share.
The show was the fourth biggest hit of the night, right behind BBC One’s unstoppable Saturday night line-up (the top six shows all belonged to the flagship channel). Casualty brought in 4 million viewers (a 21% share) at 8:50pm, while the irresistible appeal of another Mrs. Brown’s Boys (9:40pm) repeat secured 4.2 million viewers and a 23% share.
Meanwhile, ITV continued its George Lucas love-in with Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (9:45pm) (aka Star Wars: The First One) was watched by just 1.3 million viewers and claiming a 7% share.
Sunday brought a brand new day of TV and, along with it, a slightly more enthused audience. Naturally, the unbearable exotic glamour and excitement of Countryfile (BBC One, 8pm) was enough to whisk people away from the reality of their damp, unseasonal Sunday evening.
The biggest hit of the day saw the peppy presenters celebrate the summer with an uncharacteristically decent stab at irony, netting 5.6 million viewers and a 25% share.
At the same time, Channel 4 provided some historic misery to counterbalance Matt Baker’s gusto on BBC One, as the second series of machinery-child-mangling fun found in The Mill (8pm) brought in 1.3 million and a 6% share.
BBC One had similarly themed amusement at 9pm, with the début of series two of historical downer, The Village (9pm). Presumably set near enough to the glumness of The Mill, The Village continued to fight the cause of social injustice and brought in an impressive 4.6 million viewers and a 21% share.
Over on Channel 4, creepy documentary series Child Genius (9pm) came to an end, with 1.5 million viewers watching to see if the abnormally intelligent tykes would eventually turn on their parents, translating to a 6% share.
Meanwhile, ITV decided to commemorate the Great War by dramatising the writing of letters, diaries and memoirs with eager thespians attempting to convey all the emotions that come with that in the impossibly cringey The Great War: The People’s Story (9pm).
1.7 million viewers watched a varied group of actors give it their best before the inevitable sense of transparent emotional manipulation came in, attracting an average audience of 1.7 million and an 8% 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.
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