I liked it. I thought it was a huge improvement on the writers' The Worst Week of My Life because the slapstick didn't fall flat. I don't know if it was better acting or better direction or both in this new show, but the laughs in the script actually made it the screen rather than being lost along the way.

Parts of it reminded me of Last of the Summer Wine, so I know it isn't your kind of comedy.

The repeats are playing on Sunday afternoons.

But, it wasn't good. It had piddle poor ratings for three series, because the humour in the script got lost on the way to the screen.

He didn't look uncomfortable to me.

Uncomfortable was Julian Fellowes at half-nine this morning.

Very good Boxing Day Eastenders, deserves to rate highly

The continuity announcer actually said "EastEnders continues tomorrow at 9" during the credits for last night's episode.

Thanks; people should be aware then. Sorry, I was just going off the thread - I didn't see yesterday's episode.

She still peddled some nonsense at the end of the piece about TXF being the top rated programme of 2011 though...


I think in 2005, the year of The Two Ronnies Christmas Sketchbook, EE got a 10.0m overnight and was the only show to do so - so basically the same as this year.

All irrelevant anyway, because the figures posted this morning are just the "up to 2am today" figures. Overnights become ever more meaningless and irrelevant as every month passes.

I look forward to seeing the actual Christmas Day programming ratings in about a week's time.


Posted, of course, before TRB belly-flopped onto our screens, but on paper it did look the best night of the fortnight.

I am worried about the prime time animation though after seeing yesterday's figures. Having seen how much EmFm profited from folk not wanting to watch a kids' film on prime BBC1 and also how cheap shoddy filler in an ITV soap sandwich posted an inexplicably decent audience, I suspect Em, Ernie Wise and Coro will have done ok tonight - Coro of course has its own fire storyline climax, as well as EE, and saw 9.9m tune in at the end of last night's (boosted by anxious Downton jam-makers getting settled for the big event). So whereas I thought The Borrowers would profit handsomely from Ernie Wise filler, I think it may have found it harder starting midway through an ITV programme which will have been boosted by having a cartoon as competition. And will then be crushed by a resurgent Corrie in the 8pm hour.

Suspect 5-6m tops for The Borrowers now. I was hoping for 8m+ when the schedules came out.

It was brilliant though, best thing so far this Christmas, and seemed to me to be almost a pilot for a possible series. The ending didn't really seem to be an "ending" to me, more an opportunity for a possible early Saturday evening series.

I used "Ratings Downturn Abbey" way back in September when the overnights dropped slightly as "ad-gate" took hold. Old material, and not one of my best if I'm honest...


Very good...




Wowsers! Gutted for SCD, only a gnat's crochet behind TXF - and within spitting distance of "The BBC1 All Day Breakfast Royal Wedding Coverage 8am-1.30pm (excluding BBC News)"; as rzt points out the BBC HD figures once included could just push it into first place.

I'm sure Tara Conlon will be all over that one....




Actually, he's got a third and fourth series in the bag, two more specials at least, and a cheque in the bank for his low(ish)-budget iceberg hits ship remake. So he probably isn't that fussed...

Viewers hate canned laughter, but 'real-time' laughter would have worked in front of a live preview audience, maybe that was what they used and there wasn't any hehe!

So close. If the official HD ratings for Strictly come in high the final rating could be even closer. But BARB won't count it.

I'm reflecting on Bodyguard a bit now I've had chance to calm down. It started so well with some ridiculously OTT but funny slapstick intercut with establishing dialogue in the first 3 minutes, and looked really promising.

But then after that it was all just too silly to be credible - the whole premise was ridiculous, and really it was just a re-tread of the Frank Drebin/Queen slapstick in The Naked Gun. A lot of the slapstick in tonight's show worked - even something obvious like the piano lid which you could see a mile off but still made me laugh - but there was just too much of it. There should have been some tightly crafted comic writing in between the pratfalls. Take Some Mothers.... - you had no more than a couple of "stunts" in an episode with some ordinary sit-commery in between; The Naked Gun wasn't just pratfalls, there were some good gags and credible plotting in between.

The whole thing was plain silly, and Jason was miscast - a 71 year old arseing about like some low-rent Frank Spenser/Frank Drebin/Mr Bean rip off.

Questions need to be asked about how BBC1 allowed this to happen. Sure, a fine premise could result in a stinker of a show, and you can't really blame Danny Cohen for that. But they must have known this was a stinker - yet they flogged it to death, as probably their prime festive treat, albeit displaced to Boxing Day due to Downton.

Did they think we'd all be so far gone on egg nog we'd not notice?

The worry for me is not the embarrassment of a major high profile flop or the missed opportunity - it's the threat it poses to a promising new comedy institution (Mrs Brown) and giving ITV the opportunity to clean up on Monday nights for the next 5 weeks.

It's also worth noting that we believed TRB was going to start in late November - possibly 8.30pm on Wednesdays - after David Walliams (future guest star) tweeted the same. I wonder if in October, they made the decision to pull the plug on The Royle Family 2011 when it looked like no script would actually materialise, and decided they had no option but to throw Bodyguard into the festive front-line, even if they had initially decided to burn it off in the Wednesday comedy death slot?

I thought The Royal Bodyguard wasn't good, it wasn't terrible but not far from it. However, I do think it will stay at a respectable level throughout its run. I think it will attract a certain audience, like Last Of The Summer Wine, like A Life of Riley did.

As a big David Jason and Worst Week of My Life, im just disappointed how a show with such pedigree failed to deliver.

It also casts further real doubts on the quality of The One... - the short series for Christmas that did actually get pulled from the festive schedule (unlike TRB), trimmed to 3x30 mins from 3x60m originally, and given a death slot opposite Coro St.

Crikey, how bad must it be if they deemed TRB passed the quality threshold and declared it "a winner"?

(Perhaps someone got their wires crossed and pulled the wrong show out?! )

Looking at some of the comments on here it seems i was the only person to enjoy the Royal Bodyguard. I thought it was very funny and i hope it rates really well.

Oh dear! Another trouncing headline for Downton.

Downton Abbey: Viewers desert ITV's flagship drama blaming too many adverts as EastEnders wins Christmas Day ratings war

I'd be astonished if this online piece (and headline) makes it into tomorrow's paper, given how much the Mail adores and fluffs up its most favourite programme. Ever!

In the meantime, I shall amuse myself by picking through the comments from irate jam-makers wailing and moaning about the injustice of it all, and surely the figures are wrong, and "nobody asked me what I was watching last night, so these are obviously made up numbers from politically correct socialist homosexuals at the BBC...." - that sort of thing.

A bit like reading 120+ comments from GeorgeS, really....

The other comment I wanted to make tonight (I must go to bed at some point.... ) was to ask whether the 15 min all day breakdown rzt posted this morning includes ITV1+1?

If not, it doesn't make sense because the numbers come out higher than the reported "ITV1 (excl +1)" numbers.

The Mail must be spooked by your emails, Robbie - they've become very anti-ITV all of a sudden.

The channel were always going to open themselves up to these ariticles by risking Downton. If they had left it for Boxing Day and broadcast Poirot on Christmas Day no one would've batted an eyelid.

As for tonight; I think Emmerdale is going to be hurt by the scheduling and will be down in the high 5s. Ernie Wise will rate in the 4s and Coronation Street may just manage 8m, but The Borrowers could beat it because of the BBC's forward thinking scheduling. EastEnders will win the night IMO with a rating of high 9ms. The Royal Bodyguard is an interesting one but I think it'll hold up in the 7ms with Mrs Brown Boy's staying around the 6m mark. Poirot will probably hit the high 4s, low 5s.

So one of us is going to be wrong tomorrow, Robbie.

Just spent an absurd amount of time reading through the hundreds of comments today. Pretty mediocre for BBC1 as far as I can see - seems to be down across the board and not really that far ahead of ITV considering this is meant to be their flagship schedule. Corrie, McIntyre and Family Fortunes probably the ones above expectations. Strictly and Doctor Who seemed to be off quite a bit and the BBC lacked any other big success for the night whereas last year Come Fly With Me helped.

Downton at least avoided a massive flop - I'd file the whole "Downton to beat Eastenders" nonsense alongside "X Factor USA to get 20m viewers" as some of the poorer predictions of 2011 (most likely based on hyping the shows rather than any realistic predictions). I guess for ITV it depends on the money - if they broke even last night (and I'd guess that they did) then I think they might run with it again next year. It's difficult to see them actually winning one, though. While it was a solid enough performance, Downton was still way off its recent finale. And it's hard to see BBC1 having a duller schedule than they had this year.

I liked it too - was laugh out loud in our household.

The 15-minute breakdown I thought excluded +1, but having inspected it closely, it includes +1 for both viewership and percentages for ITV: http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showp...postcount=1352

Quite annoying I only just spotted that because that renders my post from yesterday a tad invalid for the BBC1 + ITV1 calculations.

Doing some very basic calculations, and excluding +1 for ITV, I get:

18:00 ….. 5.7 (25.7%) ….. 5.9 (26.6%) ….. 2.0 ( 9.1%) ….. 1.2 ( 5.3%) ….. 0.8 ( 3.5%)
18:15 ….. 6.1 (27.0%) ….. 6.2 (27.2%) ….. 2.2 ( 9.5%) ….. 1.3 ( 5.6%) ….. 0.8 ( 3.3%)
18:30 ….. 6.2 (26.9%) ….. 6.3 (27.4%) ….. 1.7 ( 7.3%) ….. 1.3 ( 5.8%) ….. 0.7 ( 3.0%)
18:45 ….. 6.8 (28.4%) ….. 6.6 (27.7%) ….. 1.5 ( 6.3%) ….. 1.3 ( 5.3%) ….. 0.7 ( 3.0%)
19:00 ….. 8.7 (34.5%) ….. 5.5 (21.5%) ….. 1.3 ( 5.3%) ….. 1.5 ( 6.0%) ….. 0.8 ( 3.1%)
19:15 ….. 9.0 (34.7%) ….. 5.9 (22.7%) ….. 1.4 ( 5.3%) ….. 1.7 ( 6.7%) ….. 0.6 ( 2.1%)
19:30 ….. 9.0 (34.4%) ….. 6.3 (24.1%) ….. 1.5 ( 5.6%) ….. 2.0 ( 7.7%) ….. 0.5 ( 2.0%)
19:45 ….. 8.9 (33.3%) ….. 6.6 (24.6%) ….. 1.6 ( 6.0%) ….. 2.4 ( 9.0%) ….. 0.5 ( 1.8%)
20:00 ….. 7.4 (27.3%) ….. 8.5 (31.3%) ….. 1.6 ( 5.9%) ….. 2.5 ( 9.2%) ….. 0.5 ( 1.9%)
20:15 ….. 7.2 (26.6%) ….. 8.8 (32.5%) ….. 1.7 ( 6.4%) ….. 2.4 ( 9.0%) ….. 0.5 ( 1.8%)
20:30 ….. 7.4 (27.0%) ….. 9.1 (33.2%) ….. 1.6 ( 6.0%) ….. 2.4 ( 8.6%) ….. 0.5 ( 1.8%)
20:45 ….. 8.0 (28.5%) ….. 9.6 (34.0%) ….. 1.9 ( 6.9%) ….. 1.7 ( 6.0%) ….. 0.5 ( 1.6%)
21:00 ….. 9.6 (32.5%) ….. 8.6 (29.2%) ….. 1.5 ( 5.0%) ….. 1.6 ( 5.6%) ….. 0.6 ( 2.0%)
21:15 ….. 9.9 (33.3%) ….. 8.3 (28.0%) ….. 1.4 ( 4.8%) ….. 1.7 ( 5.8%) ….. 0.7 ( 2.4%)
21:30 ….. 10.0 (33.5%) ….. 8.3 (27.8%) ….. 1.5 ( 4.9%) ….. 1.8 ( 6.0%) ….. 0.8 ( 2.6%)
21:45 ….. 10.2 (34.2%) ….. 8.1 (27.3%) ….. 1.5 ( 5.0%) ….. 1.8 ( 6.1%) ….. 0.8 ( 2.7%)
22:00 ….. 7.9 (28.6%) ….. 8.0 (29.1%) ….. 1.6 ( 5.6%) ….. 1.3 ( 4.6%) ….. 0.5 ( 1.9%)
22:15 ….. 7.0 (26.3%) ….. 8.0 (30.2%) ….. 1.4 ( 5.2%) ….. 1.4 ( 5.4%) ….. 0.5 ( 1.8%)
22:30 ….. 6.3 (25.0%) ….. 8.0 (31.5%) ….. 0.7 ( 2.9%) ….. 1.7 ( 6.8%) ….. 0.4 ( 1.8%)
22:45 ….. 5.9 (23.8%) ….. 8.4 (33.9%) ….. 0.6 ( 2.6%) ….. 1.7 ( 7.0%) ….. 0.4 ( 1.6%)

It doesn't make a difference of won what hour, but worth noting anyway.

Sam_Hodges Sam Hodges
For the second day, #EastEnders is the highest rating programme across all channels, averaging 9.9m, peaking at 10.6m

Excellent for EastEnders to match Xmas Day's figure in terms of averages. Good peak; I have a suspicion the Boxing Day episode will beat the Xmas Day ratings in the officials, but both could clear 11m easily.