I'm not so sure about that. Personally I found last night's episode painfully dull but I suppose if more people are enthused than not then it may pick up. I don't see it happening though. I think most people are long past the stage where they can be won back in any real sense. I wouldn't be surprised to see tonights show even lower.

the poster mmpfb makes a good point

i really thought they finished the show on the wrong note, they should have been going all out to showcase someone really good as the last audition on the first night. having a couple of joke acts at the end of the show, especially giving that woman so much airtime, just sends the wrong message

And by starting the show with another less than mediocre boyband may have sent out the wrong message about the talent level of the show.

They're trying too hard to go viral. And Honey G is far too obviously cooked up in a team meeting to reach the sort of joke-act heights that, say, Wagner did.

to me the "best" joke acts were the ones who weren't trying to be joke acts

and Honey G, i kinda feel embarassed just typing that name, was trying way too hard

Disappointing ratings for an (apparently) good episode! Hopefully it'll rise tonight but who knows? It had extremely tough competition this year; earlier in the summer holidays, bank holiday, against Casualty 30th etc and its advertising was awful. These aren't excuses but genuine reasons why a show can drop. I haven't seen it yet, as I'm abroad, but hopefull it'll improve tonight/next week.

Yeah I can see they're trying to go viral, but it's working!. The honey g lady was trending on Facebook and this boys audition has reached 4.5m+ on Facebook.

Almost 800k for Xtra Factor, isn't that double last years?

Rylan presenting would have helped

The response to Christian's audition on the FB page is amazing. 5.3 million views and 152k likes already. Never seen a response like it!

It doesn't take much to trend on Facebook, really. According to my FB 1000 people are 'talking about' Honey G. Compare that to 1 million talking about WhatsApp, or 50k talking about Richard Branson, or 13k talking about the bank holiday it's really not very much!

I don't agree - the trend on tv over the last several years is to dumb everything down. X factor had become an ugly parody of itself - the over exaggerated voice over man announcements, the big Roman amphitheatre style auditions, the persistent sob stories with rousing music when they got through, more filler than content. It's nice to see it going back to basics and I think they will get back some of the lost viewers.

It was the same old, same old:

Room auditions - Seen before

Dermot - Seen before

Judges - Seen before (just not Simon with them obviously)

Contestants watching on a screen backstage - Seen before

Contrived conversations between contestants backstage - Seen before

Sob stories - Seen before

Fake joking and forced laughter between the judges - Seen before

People being put through when they're just average singers - Seen before

Joke acts that were only slightly funny in 2006/2007 but now are just beyond boring - Seen before

The only thing new and fresh was the opening credits. They've come out with the same crap every year about how it's going to be a different show. It's a tired format. Does anyone actually watch it and take it seriously? We only watch it in our house to laugh at how comical the production of the whole thing is and how they seriously expect viewers to take the show seriously!!!

The X Factor was watched by 6.8m viewers last night making it the lowest series opener for more than a decade.

The overnight ratings figure, which includes the main ITV Channel, ITV HD and ITV+1, gave it a 34% share of the audience between 8pm and 9.30pm last night. But this was down on last year’s launch episode overnight figure of 7.64m, a share of 39%
.
This is understood to be the lowest overnight ratings performance for an opening edition of the show since 2005 when it averaged 6.7 million according to the overnights.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-...et-68m-viewers

This was already stated hours ago. Thanks for the great input.

Well, any programme nowadays is lucky to get 5 million so 6.8, seems good to me.

(Although I think it deserved at least 7.8 million. )