Originally Posted by Doctor Bench:
“How do you think EE will fare on Christmas Day, against DA?”
EastEnders will come out on top in the overnight ratings battle, I have pretty much no doubt about that. I can see why the press are hyping up the "EE v DA Christmas Day ratings battle" since DA is the most popular drama series on TV of the last decade. BUT, there has been a common pattern every single year that ITV1 programmes - including Corrie and Emmerdale - rate lower on Xmas Day than other days of the year. Normally the soaps on ITV1 rate about 10-25% lower than usual on Christmas Day, whilst non-soaps have rated as much as 25-40% lower than normal. There is no reason to believe, despite all the hype, that Downton Abbey will buck the trend - it may well not drop
as much as previous Xmas Day dramas but there will be some kind of dip, it's sort of inevitable.
DA averaged 9.2m in the overnights for its most recent series just gone by. Even if we assume DA will not rate any lower than usual on Christmas Day (i.e. get 9.2m), it would still probably just be pipped by EastEnders which in recent years has experienced a 10-20% rise on Xmas Day compared to its highest rated episode a few days' beforehand. This year, I expect EE to rate more like 5-10% higher than its highest rated episode beforehand (the 8.8m which it got on Monday a couple of days ago) since it's facing tougher competition than normal, but that would still be enough to edge past DA, even if DA rates as it normally does. But I think DA will rate lower than 9.2m anyway, by about -15% (which is being quite conservative IMO - in previous years programmes have dropped more than that), which ought to be enough for 'Enders to beat DA by at least 1m in the overnights, I should think.
The thing is: BBC1 programmes on Christmas Day tend to rate about 20% higher than normal, whilst ITV1 programmes tend to rate about 20% lower than normal. So there's a 40% swing towards the BBC, meaning that for an ITV1 programme to win head-to-head it has to be millions more popular than its competition. Whilst Downton Abbey is undoubtedly extremely popular, it's not "millions" more popular than EastEnders, and that's why I can't see it winning. 11-12 years ago, ITV1 aired Who Wants to Be A Millionaire on Christmas Day, a show which at the time was the biggest thing on television, getting 15m+ viewers for regular episodes, yet its ratings dropped by a fifth on Christmas Day to about 12m and was beaten by BBC1. I can see the same sort of thing happening with DA too.
So my rough predictions (to the nearest half a million) for Christmas Day are:
Overnights: EastEnders: 9.5m, Downton Abbey: 7.5m (exc +1)
Officials: EastEnders: 11.0m, Downton Abbey: 10.0m (exc +1)
Downton might be 0.5m closer with +1 included. But I do think EE is most likely going to come out on top, especially in the overnights. For the end-of-year top 10 chart though, unfortunately for EE, I can't see any episode left this year rating higher than Corrie's highest rated episode so EE will probably have to settle for the 2nd-most-watched top soap rating of the year. EE, however, does have a good early chance of claiming the top soap rating of 2012 if it can pull in a big audience for the New Year's Day or Monday 2nd January episode.
- though the ratings usually given out on the tv ratings thread by posters such as D.M.N very often don't co-relate to the ratings given out by DS overnights (tape-checked, HD & +1 included or excluded) - therefore comparisons between the two shouldn't really be made.
- but making statements such as being 60k up & 650k down are only meaningfull if the data comes from the same source.
