Glee’s tribute episode sees 7% of audience tweeting
Friday night kicked off with a rather sombre episode of Glee as the writers and cast had the tricky task of dealing with the death of Cory Monteith’s character Flynn.
Slyly side-stepping just how exactly the quarterback died, the ‘very special episode’ saw the primary coloured-wearing troop tone down the clothes but not the musical emoting. Fans of Rachel’s particular style of patent-pending cry/singing were in for a treat as the Glee Club stared death in the face and dealt with it the only way they knew how – showtunes!
While the difficult episode only brought in 31,400 viewers to Sky One at 8pm, Twitter was awash with mourning Gleeks. The snot-fuelled singfest generated 21,895 tweets while it was airing, resulting in 70 tweets per 1000 viewers.
This was only bettered by Geordie Shore at 10pm on MTV which mind bogglingly managed to get 32% of its 48,000 die hard followers to form sentences and put them on the internet.
On the theme of modern day cautionary tales, dribbling dancing puppet Britney Spears was on Alan Carr: Chatty Man (Channel 4, 10pm) to spout some pre-scripted banter in order to drive up album sales. An audience of 1.2 million watched Britney form sentences and facial expressions through a concrete wall of medication, resulting in a 7% share.
Half an hour later on BBC One, rival professional camp person Graham Norton finally elevated James Corden to the level of Paul McCartney and Natalie Portman as they all shared a sofa. The Graham Norton Show performed much better, netting 3.5 million viewers and a 25% share.
While waiting around for his own Friday night show, Julian Clary decided to kill some time by keeping Piers Morgan company in his time slot. Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (ITV, 9pm) saw the brave, intrepid journalist prope Julian (ooh eerr) about his life, netting 3.7 million viewers and a 18% share.
Despite all the prime time distractions, the biggest draw of the day went out at 7:30pm on ITV as Hayley brightened up everybody’s Friday by bringing up euthanasia. 8.2 million viewers tuned in for Coronation Street and attempted to hang on to the buzzy Friday feeling, resulting in a 41% share.
The rest of the weekend was a mixture of the usual gaudy reality competitions and big budget dramas. Strictly Come Dancing gathered its strength and successfully defeated The X Factor on both Saturday and Sunday night.
Getting a head start Saturday evening was Strictly Come Dancing (BBC One, 6:30pm) which went on for just under two hours and brought in the weekend’s biggest audience. The sequins and sparkles extravaganza was watched by 9.7 million viewers and a 44% share.
The X Factor kicked off at 8pm on ITV, overlapping its rival for 20 minutes and secured an audience of 7.6 million viewers, despite its 2 hour 5 minutes running time.
Although more people watched the ballroom action, Cowell’s younger audience triggered more activity in the Twitersphere. Strictly Come Dancing managed just 40,851 tweets compared to The X Factor‘s 331,265.
There was a repeat performance of the result on Saturday as Strictly Come Dancing: The Results (BBC One, 7:45pm) brought in 9.4 million viewers and The X Factor Results netted 8.6 million viewers.
Elsewhere, trusted schedule mainstay Countryfile (BBC One, 6:15pm) once again performed to its usual standard. 6.8 million viewers watched as John Craven looked at big rocks in Yorkshire, resulting in the day’s fourth biggest audience.
At 9pm on Channel 4, Homeland continued to string viewers along a precarious path with its third series. 1.7 million viewers tuned in, hoping against hope that they weren’t in purgatory all along and the plane really did crash on that island.
At the same time, BBC One threw its period hat into the ring and attempted to take on the mammoth that is ITV’s Downton Abbey with the second series of haberdashery drama (no, seriously) The Paradise. The purveyor of frilly things (along with a bit of scandal) pulled in 5.2 million viewers and a 20% share.
Meanwhile, the Grantham family were doing much better on ITV, as per usual. The nation’s favourite Sunday period piece saw Lady Mary get her groove back and was watched by 8.9 million viewers, resulting in a 35% share and the weekend’s biggest audience.
The Social TV Analytics report is a daily leaderboard displaying the latest social TV analytics Twitter data from SecondSync. The table shows the top UK TV shows as they are mentioned on Twitter, which MediaTel has correlated with the BARB overnight programme ratings for those shows (only viewable to BARB subscribers).
Overnight data is available each morning in mediatel.co.uk’s TV Database, with all BARB registered subscribers able to view reports for terrestrial networks and key multi-channel stations.