Disappointing rating for Doctor Who last night. That's its 5th lowest overnight rating since the revival in 2005. I could understand if it had fallen that low against something like BGT or football, but against ASFF I do expect it to rate better than that. I suppose it'll timeshift a lot, but a c.7m official rating will still be relatively low compared to how episodes have usually done in the last few years. It wasn't a great night for BBC1 with fillers in their schedule like Celebrity MasterChef and Live at the Apollo. At the moment, they're just gearing up for a couple of weeks' time when SCD and Merlin return which will give them a massive boost. Casualty, in fairness, was a bit higher than usual when partly up against XF.
Good stuff for All Star Family Fortunes. It's obviously benefitting from airing in that pre-XF slot, but it's certainly one of the higher rated game shows ITV have anyway.They do about 11 episodes of it per year, I do think they could extend that to something like 18 and use it to plug the gaps where they usually find it difficult (such as summer) as I think it could get a decent audience (4m) even without TXF. The X Factor, once again, really solid - on a par with the rating it had on the same night last year and it's been very consistent around the same 11m (inc +1) mark so far this series. That's an important rebound for JR after last week's poor rating and similar to how Piers Morgan's first episode last year post XF rated.
As for C5, there was much less hype about the boxing this time and competition was tougher than the last fight, but 1m is still quite low. It didn't help matters that the fight finished quite early and there were some technical issues. As for BB, that really is a very poor rating for it, and on Saturdays it's got to the stage where it's rating worse than how Law and Order: SVU was doing in that slot previously. I'm a bit optimistic that it can rate higher next Saturday though, as usually programmes airing after football/boxing rate lower than normal, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it nudge back over 1m next Saturday. But something really needs to be done to get people back watching again- whether it's a big twist or just loads of promotion/stories on C5 and Richard Desmond's newspapers/magazines.
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. I suspect with +1, it would've been at 5.4/5.5m.
