Never in a million years.

Just as a comparison to last year when BGT was on:

News at Ten: ITV vs BBC:
26/05/2008: 5.2m (25%) vs 3.8m (18%) [Bank Holiday]
27/05/2008: 3.4m (17%) vs 4.1m (19%)
28/05/2008: 3.4m (16%) vs 4.7m (22%)
29/05/2008: 3.5m (18%) vs 4.2m (20%)
30/05/2008: n/a (Late News was on @ 11pm)

25/05/2009: 6.2m (33%) vs 3.5m (13%) [Bank Holiday]
26/05/2009: 6.1m (28%) vs 4.1m (19%)
27/05/2009: n/a (Champions League)
28/05/2009: 6.1m (29%) vs 3.6m (17%)

Actually Paul Ross said the final will get over 20 million but what does he know?

There will be more people who watch part of the show that either the show peak or the show average, so it depends what measure is being applied.

I wonder if the "Breaking News" announcement was an attempt to take PR away from BGT or whether today's date was planned?

*waits for late schedule change for tomorrow to announce a "Doctor Who Confidental" episode.

Bit of a 'who cares?' story if you ask me...

If so, then it's a bad move, as I don't think Doctor Who is enough to take PR away from BGT right now. They should have waited until next week.

Where would a Confidential go, though? Early evening tomorrow is full of films, so they can't pull any of them really, as it would mean having to find another replacement as well as Confidential to cover the time.

The news has been announced now - what would be the point of a Confidential dedicated to an unknown actress?

Exactly, although stranger things have happened. If they did do one, it would be lucky to break 2m against BGT tomorrow.

It just striked me as a very strange day to announce it on the eve of the BGT final. They did that with Matt Smith when ITV had Liverpool/Preston, they went ahead and announced it - Confidential that day got big figures.

How did Hollyoaks do on E4 last night?

It's been the shows biggest week of the year so far but it hasn't really been reflected in the ratings, especially in comparison to when Niall blew up the church. E4 got 750,000 though on Wednesday, but last night's ratings aren't listed.

Surely though it must have got more than the 470,000 and 530,000 the Big Bang Theory and Inbetweeners got.

I don't know.

I really wanted to watch this all week, but the other half got bored of it after the first semi-final.

However, he has promised that we can watch the final on Saturday.

I wonder how many else are like this?

Just going back to Doctor Who, I knew there were 2 specials at Xmas... but I didn't know that there was one before that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waters_of_Mars

Apparantly sometime in November.... I presume a Saturday, surely that has a strong likelyhood of clashing with The X Factor?

Soaps 28/05/09

Emmerdale 5.39m (37.7%)

Eastenders 6.51m (36.3%)

Coronation Street 7.7m (37.7%)

Susan Boyle's more than likely helping News at Ten

What on earth makes you think that?!

6.4m (31%), have Guardian changed it? I think it equates to 10pm-10:30pm, not 10pm-10:35pm.

Emmerdale, and Corrie's shares are a bit inflated?!

Anyone else think More Talent's ratings are poor?

Not even 1m viewers for a direct spin-off from a show with 13m viewers.

I think the show is way too childish. They alienate a lot of the audience right away. I can't really bare to suffer it.

I'm sure NaT must have had an effect as a lot of BGMT's target audience would have stayed with ITV1.

I think ER may have dented BGMT, I expect BGMT will pick up today and tomorrow.

Haha in the credits of BGT the ITV announcer goes "News At Ten with a Susan Boyle exclusive!".

You can just see it now. About 10 million people ready, armed with remote control to turn over and then after that, remote is put back on the arm of their chair.

Good on ITV I say.

It's a piss poor programme. I'm really not sure why they went for Stephen Mulhern who has never really been able to make the transition from children's TV to general entertainment. It's a really childish programme and they somehow manage to pad it out for an hour with really gormless, pointless segments. Half and hour for a quick interview with the finalists, the people who didn't get through, the judges and then Ant and Dec after the break would really be more than enough for this programme.

It seems to have been affected by News at Ten, as it got 1.6m on Sunday, 1.2m on Monday, and consistently got about 1.5m for the auditions, and is consistently higher than what Xtra Factor usually gets. It should break 2m for the post-results show on Saturday.

I do think that the show needs a lot of work, though it's far better than what Xtra Factor was with Fearne Cotton. They need to base it more on Xtra with Holly, who made it pretty entertaining last year.

I think BGMT would benefit from having more of the judges and hosts and less of the random guests. It doesn't help that many of the "stars" of the show are too young to appear! And obviously NaT is taking away quite a bit of the potential audience.

Definately. Ant and Dec have only been on once this year for the live shows, and that was only to do the ridiculous Ferraro Rocher competition. They were on it a lot at the auditions, and they need to feature more at the live shows, as do the judges.