The BBC’s cookery giant, Masterchef, took its great big egg whisk of airwave domination and beat ITV and Channel 4 to a pair of floppy peaks, overnight figures have shown.
Around 4.75m viewers, who were hungry for a bit of John and Gregg, tuned into BBC One to catch the first in a new series of the hit cookery competition.
As a percentage, that’s roughly 20% of people who were tuning in across the nation at 9pm last night.
We were blogging live throughout the show and you can catch up with the “total jokes” here.
Ditching last year’s more elaborate X-Factor style knockout rounds (which served up sob stories alongside the main meals) appear to have done the show no harm.
Over on ITV, bosses opted to schedule a foodie show of a vastly different nature and came out all the worse for it. The Biggest Loser attracted 2.61m viewers…almost half the number who tuned into Masterchef.
Let’s face it: Losing weight is so “first week of Jan”. As February approaches, New Year diets have evidently left us ravenous wrecks who could not give a doodah about some other fatty’s plight. Give us high cal, high sugar, high fat restaurant standard foot any day.
Perfectly proportioned, Brian Cox, continued to provide BBC Two viewers with solid entertainment value with Stargazing Live averaging 3.26m in the 8pm slot.
The battle against the bulge continued over on Channel 4 with The Fat Fighters, who swallowed only 986 thousand viewers. While later on, 15 Kids and Counting delivered 2.89m from 9pm.
Our winner is ….clearly BBC One. Earning 23.8% of the audience share throughout the primetime slot.
We’re guessing the Masterchef novelty factor will not be wearing off tonight as the show continues with more nailbiting culinary battles. Tune in at 9pm on BBC One for more of Gregg, John and Aki’s face.
