TV Overnights: Emmerdale secures 7m viewers

Rural high-drama was the nation’s choice last night as Emmerdale pulled in the highest number of viewers with an average audience of seven million.

In Wednesday’s episode, Gennie’s concerns about Nikhil’s health escalated, though the audience were not as worried with viewers trailing off in the last fifteen minutes. The audience peaked in the first half with 7.4 million watching, scoring the highest active reach of the night (35%).

Emmerdale was immediately followed by UEFA Champions League live from Stade Velodrome but the Marseille v Inter Milan game failed to capture a major prime time audience. The match, which resulted in a 1-0 win for Marsielle, had an average audience of 2.4 million viewers. Interest peaked just before half-time with 3.1 million viewers (a 14.4% reach).

BBC One achieved a steadier amount of interest from the viewing public throughout the night. As the game kicked off over in France the last episode of Rip-Off Britain attracted an average audience of 5.2 million viewers.

The investigation show featuring the BBC’s holy trinity of trusted faces (Gloria Hunniford, Angela Rippon and Julia Somerville) reached 26% of the available audience. This was followed by classroom drama Waterloo Road, which returned after a three month break, bringing a peak audience of five million viewers with it.

Masterchef averaged 4.7 million viewers in the 9pm slot, peaking in the last fifteen minutes with 5.3 million viewers.

Maternity fly-on-the-wall drama One Born Every Minute secured Channel 4’s biggest audience of the night with an average of 3.3 million viewers. A further 506,000 viewers tuned in an hour later to catch the episode, featuring particularly nervous mothers-to-be, on Channel 4 +1.

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.