Two consecutive nights of ITV’s BGT leave BBC One broken
The bank holiday weekend kicked off with a fairly energetic Saturday as the nation settled around giant TVs as yet another football tournament came to a momentary end.
To warm the cockles of sport-mad fanatics before the main event, BBC One brought viewers the Formula 1: The Monaco Grand Prix – Qualifying Highlights at 5:25pm. 2.5 million viewers tuned in to see celebrity racer and advertising enthusiast Lewis Hamilton get all catty with fellow Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg, with the soap-like drama netting a 17% share.
Later on over on ITV, the UEFA Champions League Final Live got under way at 7pm. After 45 minutes of friendly, informative and professional chit chat from Adrian Chiles, the game between Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid brought in an average audience of 4.8 million viewers for the entire four hour coverage, with an audience share of 24% subjected to Cristiano Ronaldo’s topless victory dances.
Real Madrid’s 4-1 victory at Estadio da Luz in Lisbon saw the audience peak at 6.7 million viewers towards the end, resulting in a peak share of 31%.
At the same time, non football-affiliated viewers had the pleasure of choosing between Casualty on BBC One at 8:40pm (which brought in 3.8 million viewers and an 18% share) and the horror of sad privileged teenagers in Channel 4’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (9pm). 1 million viewers tuned in to see the début of repulsive CG Muppet Baby Renesmee, netting a 6% share.
Later on that night, Joanna Lumley took viewers gently by the hands and led them down an eventful trip down memory lane as faces from the past came together to celebrate 50 Years of BBC Two Comedy (BBC Two, 9:30pm).
An audience of 1.9 million viewers were reminded just how ‘ground breaking’ The Office was for the millionth time, with the non-stop two-hour event resulting in a 10% share.
Sunday brought the proper finale of Formula 1: The Monaco Grand Prix (BBC One, 5pm) – even if they were only highlights. 3.3 million viewers watched as – BFFs or not – Hamilton and Rosberg took the top two spots for Mercedes, netting a 23% share.
Sunday was the first of two consecutive nights that ITV’s rescheduled juggernaut, Britain’s Got Talent (7pm), destroyed one of BBC One’s long-running performers.
7.8 million viewers tuned in to see latest round of the quirky and the tragic, netting a 39% share and badly bruising Countryfile (BBC One, 7pm) in the process. Usually Sunday’s big performer, this week’s slice of agricultural innocence only brought in 4.8 million viewers and a 24% share.
8:30pm on, ITV signalled that time of year when all the soap actors are given permission to scrub off their characters garish make up and glam up for a few hours. The British Soap Awards 2014 brought a pageantry of inappropriate dress to the nation’s TV screens, with 5.2 million viewers (a 25% share) hoping that Corrie‘s Tina McIntyre would be killed off that very night in a surprise twist.
9pm brought a brand new police procedural to BBC One, ensuring that an overcrowded market can squeeze in just one more troubled detective. Naturally, as with all recent brooding crime shows, this one came with a twist: not only is Quirke set in the olden days but it’s also set in Ireland – two genre-busting shocks for the price of one. An audience of
4.2 million viewers watched the ‘maverick’ sepia CSI-type attempt to uncover the truth behind a young woman’s death, resulting in a 20% share.
Tuesday evening brought some normality and structure back to our screens as countryside crime drama Emmerdale took in 5.9 million viewers (a 30% share) for ITV at 7pm.
Just afterwards – and for the second night in a row – Britain’s Got Talent (ITV, 7:30pm) came along and gobbled up the available TV audience with only 5.1 million viewers (a 22% share) tuning in to EastEnders (BBC One, 7:30pm) despite its recent resurgence.
A total of 9.1 million viewers and a 39% share tuned in for the main event, with a further 7.8 million coming back for the Britain’s Got Talent Results at 9:30pm on ITV.
But it was a late-night edition of Coronation Street (9:30pm) that won yesterday’s soap battle with 8.7 million anticipating the build-up to this week’s most recent murder (the cobbles claim one victim a month on average these days), resulting in a healthy 37% share.
The Social TV Analytics report is a daily leaderboard displaying the latest social TV analytics Twitter data from SecondSync. The table shows the top UK TV shows as they are mentioned on Twitter, which MediaTel has correlated with the BARB overnight programme ratings for those shows (only viewable to BARB subscribers).
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. Overnight data supplied by TRP are based on 15 minute slot averages. This may differ from tape checked figures, which are based on a programme’s actual start and end time.
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