The Winter Olympics has doubled BBC Two’s all-day share of the audience, beating ITV for two weekends running. The channel saw the audience peak at 3.9 million when Jenny Jones landed the first medal for the UK on snow and daily highlights shows have been pulling in ratings of around two to three million.
While this week’s Brit Awards found its lowest audience since going live in 2007, at an average of 4.6 million, it was a twitter hit, with over four million tweets. One Direction heart throb Harry Styles was retweeted over 150,000 times.
After some real drama ratings successes at the start of the year, the BBC has seen a bit of a dip in its drama ratings, though nothing to send commissioners rushing to their in-box.
The sunshine-drenched detective show Death in Paradise on Tuesday evenings has seen a dip in ratings from launch of over seven million, though it’s still well above the six million mark. And The Musketeers which launched in January with 7.4 million viewers has been recommissioned, despite a dip in ratings just over five million for subsequent episodes.
Channel 4’s much anticipated comedy drama Babylon launched at the start of this month with a Danny Boyle directed opener which attracted 1.9 viewers, up against BBC Two’s Dragon’s Den which found an audience of 2.9 million.
ITV Saturday night show Splash! is reportedly facing the axe after a peak of just 4.4 million viewers tuned in to watch the final on Saturday night, compared to a peak of 6.5 million for the first series. This year it has been up against The Voice, which has put in a strong ratings performance for BBC One.
Channel 4 documentary ratings hit Benefits Street bowed out on 4.5 million earlier this month. While Channel 5 tapped into the show’s success with a live debate on benefits which pulled in over two million viewers.
Channel 5 also had a nice fillip in ratings when Jim Davidson won Celebrity Big Brother at the end of January. The live show clocked an average audience of 3.2 million.
Pippa Considine
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