TV viewing round-up: February 2015

Madonna certainly knew how to get maximum publicity for her latest album release, though maybe not the way she originally intended.

Her appearance at The Brit Awards 2015, which saw her much talked about cape induced fall, attracted a decent average audience of just under 6 million viewers.

Despite the fact that the second series hadn’t gripped the nation in the same fashion as the first one did, Broadchurch still managed to attract a sizeable audience for ITV this month.

The final episode of the series pulled in an impressive 9.6 million viewers, mainly dealing with the court case to previous series child murder, which was only around 300,000 few than the final episode of the first series.

JK Rowling’s first major literary offering since the conclusion of her well known boy wizard adventures, saw BBC One adapt The Casual Vacancy into a three-part mini series.

Set in a set in a suburban West Country town called Pagford and dealing with the death of a beloved Parish Councillor, the first episode was watched by an average of 8.3 million viewers.

February is one of the few times in the year that top flight rugby is available free to air, thanks to BBC’s coverage of Six Nations Rugby.

Kicking off this year’s tournament was the Friday night match Wales vs England, that was seen by just under 7.5 million viewers on BBC One.

Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway returned the give a well needed boost to ITV’s lacklustre Saturday night schedules. The dependable Geordie duo attracted 7.3 million viewers for the first edition of the latest series.

Other programmes that rated well this month include: Benidorm, with 5.5 million viewers; FA Cup: Preston vs Manchester United, watched by 5.8 million viewers, pre-controversy Top Gear, which had an average audience of 6.6 million and the penultimate edition of Death In Paradise seen by 9.1 million people.

Top Programmes (excluding soaps):

Sky vs Freeview (share):

Sky vs Cable Digital (share):

Cable Digital vs Freeview (share):