TV Overnights: double Emmerdale breezes past EastEnders with 5.9m viewers
Paul O’Grady’s Working Britain (9pm) secured the Thursday prime time slot for BBC One as the former Lily Savage continued with his tribute to working class people of the nation (you know the type – the BBC has a soap about them and everything).
The second and final part of O’Grady’s nostalgic look back at working class history was heavily rose tinted – a time when everyone was poor but laughter echoed over the broken cobbled streets etc.
The astonishingly vague odyssey saw Paul meandering about with old mates – brought together under the theme that they all had to work for a living – and managed to bring in the exact same audience as last week’s episode.
4 million viewers, translating to a 19% share, joined Paul on his deluded walk down memory lane, bringing in the biggest audience in the time slot.
There was no respite from the reality format over on ITV as a Hollywood friend swung by to educate us all about the evils of poaching. When it came down to what show would win Thursday night’s prestigious What…Really? prize there was really no competition.
For some random reason, ITV nabbed Tom Hardy – him off the big screen – for its prime time slot, filling it with an hour of the actor warbling on about cuddly animals. To be fair Poaching Wars with Tom Hardy (ITV,9pm) was all about helping the elephants and rhinos who are in an extremely precarious position but that still didn’t take away any of the randomness from the event.
Only 1.2 million joined Tom on the first half of his African holiday, netting a 6% share for ITV.
Meanwhile, Channel 5 opened up the Borehamwood Gate of Hell and unleashed 13 horrifying malignant spirits onto an unsuspecting audience as the 100th millionth Celebrity Big Brother (9pm) got underway. From British soaps to American reality series, Channel 5 has spent the last few months scouring the planet and scraping the bottom of as many barrels as they could find.
Celebrities such as Dustin Diamond – former Screech in Saved by the Bell, current porn star – helped bring in a bigger audience than the finale of Pleb Big Brother on Monday night. 2.7 million viewers tuned in to see just how mentally stable Les and Janice Battersby are now, securing a 14% share.
If all that ‘reality’ content was too much for you, Channel 4 offered up a way out by allowing viewers to escape into pure fantasy – by way of an award winning documentary. The too-mental-to-be-made-up story of a missing Texan child and his sudden ‘reappearance’ years later is the focus of Bart Layton’s universally praised film The Imposter (9pm).
1 million viewers tuned in to see the interviews with family members as they helped the unbelievable tale unfold, resulting in a 6% share.
At 8pm the latest Celebrity MasterChef (BBC One) brought in a solid 3.9 million viewers while a new series of Location, Location, Location bagged Channel 4’s biggest audience of the day with 1.7 million viewers.
In the end it was the soaps that grabbed the top three spots of the night. EastEnders (BBC One, 7:30pm) gave viewers another chance to get to know the increasingly precocious new Cindy Beale and her giant head of hair, with 5.8 million viewers and a 31% share.
But it was commercial rival ITV with its rural soap that secured the top two spots of the day. 5.9 million viewers tuned in at 8pm to see Paddy and Rhona’s marriage go supernova, resulting in a 33% share. As expected, the second episode of Emmerdale was down slightly, with the audience falling to 5.8 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.