TV Overnights: 6.3m viewers for BBC One’s The Apprentice

The second episode of the new series of The Apprentice (9pm) secured BBC One the biggest audience of Wednesday night, netting a 27% audience share. This week the increasingly barmy Lord Sugar thought the best way of filtering the executive wheat from the chav was to ask the teams to create a concept for new indispensible household gadgets.

After last week’s failure Team Sterling turned their brain-storming dials to max and invented Splish Splash, a transparent screen for the bath (!). Although it appeared modern human creativity had reached its zenith with Splish Splash, the boys appeared from nowhere and pulled it out of the (rubbish) bag. The creation of the Eco Press, a cross between a domestic bin and a spin ashtray from the 70’s, secured a second victory for Team Phoenix. Although down 800,000 viewers from last year, the latest instalment of series eight was watched by a healthy 6.3 million viewers.

Despite a lower than usual audience for Emmerdale this past week, Wednesday’s episode (ITV1, 7pm) still captured a decent audience share of 31%. Relationships sure move fast in the sleepy village, with Aaron having to break the news to Ed that they won’t be moving to France together. Aaron justified his decision by explaining he felt that he was needed in the village. Nothing to do with the fact they met two weeks ago, then. 5.6 million viewers tuned in to watch Aaron break the sensible news.

Live UEFA Champions League (7:30pm) followed on ITV1 with Adrian Chiles presenting the warm-up. The game kicked off at 8pm, with 3.7 million people tuning in to see AC Milan face-off against Barcelona in the quarter-final at San Siro. The game ended in a nil all draw, after a dull second half, with a 17% audience share watching the entire coverage.

Over on BBC Two was The Apprentice: You’re Fired (10pm), bringing the biggest audience of the day for the channel. Dara Ó Briain held the post-mortem, trying to figure out what went wrong for Team Sterling (spolier: they had a really rubbish product) with help from Hugh Dennis and The Guardian’s Grace Dent. The spin-off show, featuring Maria fresh from her nap, brought in an average audience of 2.2 million viewers.

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.