TV Overnights: Frozen Planet succeeds in I’m a Celebrity’s absence

BBC One’s Frozen Planet took advantage of the absence of I’m a Celebrity last night as it peaked with 7 million viewers compared to last week’s 5.7 million at the 9pm slot.

Attenborough’s documentary aired it’s fifth episode of the series in which the arrival of Winter struck both the Arctic and Antarctic, picking up a healthy 27% of the audience share compared to a lower 22% last week as it tried to compete with I’m a Celebrity.

Over on ITV1 and ITV1 HD replacing the show was the live UEFA Champions League, which started at 7.30pm airing the German team Bayer Leverkusen versus Chelsea match until 10pm.

The match averaged a collective 3.5 million viewers and peaked with 4.4 million at the kick-off time of 7.45pm over the two channels, holding 15% of the audience share.

The soap’s did expectedly well, at the earlier time of 7.00pm Emmerdale averaged 6 million viewers for ITV1. Following this on BBC One at the 7.30pm slot, Eastenders averaged 8 million viewers, holding a substantial 35% of the audience share.

BBC Two’s Masterchef: The Professionals brought in a healthy average of 2.8 million viewers for the cooking programme. At 10pm the channel aired a repeat of Ricky Gervais’ new comedy Life’s too Short collecting 1.1 million viewers.

Channel 4’s Grand Designs brought in 2 million viewers at the peak time slot of 9pm, followed by chat shows from Chris Moyles at 10pm averaging 1.3 million viewers and a repeat of Alan Carr: Chatty Man at 10.50pm bringing in 950,000 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.