TV viewing round-up: March 2014

Like knock-off price boomerang, this month saw the return of Derek and Rodney Trotter for a brief sketch during BBC’s bi-annual sporting charity fund-raiser, Sport Relief.

This year’s show saw the Trotter brothers encounter David Beckham doing his best Trigger impression, with a sequence of exchanges that played up the former Man United player’s perceived lack of intelligence.

Proving to be one of the notable highlights of the evening, along with the unexpected reunion of Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan for a rendition of ‘Especially For You’, the show pulled in just over 8 million viewers for the main pre-Ten O’Clock News section on BBC One.

Kylie features again on this month’s chart thanks to her (one series only) appearance as a mentor on The Voice UK.

After seemingly endless weeks of blind auditions and OTT face scrunching by Ms Minogue and her fellow celebrity mentors, the first of this year’s battle rounds kicked off with 8.1 million viewers.

The Widower saw the usually comedic Reece Shearsmith turn his hand to dramatic acting by playing the notorious wife-murderer Malcolm Webster.

Featuring top notch performances from the former League of Gentlemen star, alongside Sheridan Smith and John Hannah, the final part of the true life crime adaptation achieved an audience of 7.3 million viewers.

ITV finally said goodbye to former ratings winner Dancing On Ice, as the ninth series drew to a close with ex-Brookside actor Ray Quinn crowned the all-star celebrity winner.

The skating show drew to a close on 9 March with an average audience of 6.7 million viewers, considerably down from the ratings high of 12.1 million back in the glory days of March 2008.

After an initial broadcast last year, where it looked like a one-off crime drama randomly set in Scotland, Shetland returned to BBC One for an extended run of six episodes.

Last seen biting the dust in ITV’s short-lived sci-fi drama Primeval, Douglas Henshall played DI Jimmy Perez investigating the death of a teenage girl on a secluded beach (because there are never enough dead teenagers on telly it seems).

The opening episode proved to be the most popular, with 6.4 million people tuning in to the first instalment of a two-part story.

Not much else managed to shake up the established order this month, with Endeavour (6.3 million), DCI Banks (6.2 million), Outnumbered (6.2 million) and Antiques Roadshow (5.9 million) filling out a fairly predictable top programme chart.

Top Programmes (excluding soaps):

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