Junior Masterchef makes a muted return
Junior Masterchef failed to win the night for the first time on Sunday.
The return of the cooking competition after being put on hold by Ten for the Commonwealth Games rated 1.389m, second for the night behind Seven News (1.392m), according to preliminary overnight ratings from OzTam.
It was also the weakest rating for Junior Masterchef to date. Its last episode before the games rated 1.507m, while the first episode of the series had rated 2.202m.
Nine’s movie length modern version of Sherlock, from the BBC, rated 1.097m, just ahead of Seven’s The X Factor (1.081m).
During the time that all three shows were on at once, Junior Masterchef was well ahead of The X Factor, which did below 1m in its first hour.
Sunday also saw a strong performance from Nine’s digital channel Go, which achieved a share of 6%, with The Big Bang Theory pulling in an average audience of 430,000, extremely strong for a digital channel.
Meanwhile , Saturday night saw The Bill bow out with 993,000 for ABC1 for the final episode of the long-running British police drama. It narrowly beat the first Saturday outing of Hey Hey It’s Saturday which rated 979,000 for Nine.
Sunday’s top 15 shows:
- Seven News Seven 1.392m
- Junior Masterchef Ten 1.389m
- Bones Seven 1.139m
- Nine News Nine 1.111m
- Sherlock Nine 1.097m
- The X Factor Seven 1.081m
- Sunday Night Seven 1.043m
- 60 Minutes Nine 1.036m
- Modern Family – Episode 2 Ten 1.034m
- ABC News ABC 0.920m
- Last Chance to See ABC 0.875m
- Poirot ABC 0.874m
- ABC News Update ABC 0.835m
- Offspring Ten 0.831m
- Hot Pursuit Nine 0.823m
Sunday’s share:
- Seven: 24.3%
- Nine: 21.7%
- Ten: 17.3%
- ABC1: 15.6%
- GO!: 6.0%
- SBS1: 4.0%
- 7TWO: 2.5%
- 7mate: 2.2%
- One: 1.5%
- SBS2: 1.5%
- ABC News 24: 1.0%
- ABC2: 0.9%
- ABC3: 0.4%
- Gem: 1.0%
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Sherlock was brilliant. Best new show for years..
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Loved Sherlock! i want a series not just 2 eps!
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If you think Sherlock was good – wait till Luther comes out. Best drama of the year for me.
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Couldn’t agree more – Sherlock was brilliant… can’t wait for the second helping tonight!
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I’m going to throw this out there: last night’s X Factor was the strongest episode they’ve had so far. Solid performances all around.
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As they paraphrase in the classics … No shit (that) Sherlock.
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Luther has already started. Aired over the weekend
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Most impressed by Sherlock (well, maybe not with the floating text messages).
Wasn’t too worried by updating; after all, what is House (House = Holmes; grumpy sleuth with addiction issues; Wilson = Watson etc etc)
But how on earth did the ABC miss out on Sherlock, seeing it’s a BBC/PBS co-production?
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And maybe Ten might learn that it makes no sense to build up momentum with a show like Junior Masterchef, and then cleave it with two weeks of Commonwealth Games.
Perhaps the programmer responsible will get the chop where the Masterchefs chop
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Tim, how much credibility do you attach to the TV ratings data?
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Hi Campbell,
In its favour – it’s every day, which arguably makes TV the most accountable medium.
Against: It’s based on a sample, and of course doesn’t measure what that sample is actually doing in the room at the time.
So it’s probably pretty robust as a buying currency and a means of juding how one show has done against another. But of course it can never be precisely right about how many people actually watched.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Hi Campbell,
As Tim points out, the TV ratings are a sample. Mind you a pretty big one (around 13,000 people a day with every minute of the day reported for metro and regional). Where the sample can struggle is with some of the very small channels – e.g. community broadcasting, subscription TV tier-only channels – but they tend to be bought on the uniqueness of their niche target rather than the size of their audience.
To put the sample size into perspective the major pollsters correctly predicted a hung parliament before the recent Federal election based on sample sizes of 1,000-2,000. Yep – we put more sample size into TV than elections!
Also, the sample data is closely interrogated every day – we know that not everyone pushes their button correctly every day so up to 10% of the sample is removed because of data that just doesn’t make sense (like leaving the Foxtel box on the cricket all night after you’ve gone to bed – false tuning).
So, all in all, TV’s measurement is very much world class. Of course, it just enumerates the audience – it tells you nothing about why people watch shows, what they think of them (though watching them episode after episode gives you a pretty good clue), though it does tell you if they turn off part the way through (another good clue).
In contrast to other media TV is ‘way, way up there’. For example, I often hear that online is the most measurable medium. That it is. It is also the least measured “audience” of any medium. It has historically focussed on hits, page impresssions, unique browsers etc. All of those bits and bytes in the data stream is one computer talking to another one. We as users make the assumption that a computer = a person and it very often doesn’t. We also assume that a cookie = a unique person and after a week or two that is very much the exceptionand not the rule. The data stream can make assumptions about the demographics or ‘who’ is in the data stream, but they are more often that ot exactly that – assumptions. That is, online measures the quantum of traffic very well, but not so much the audience. Conversely, TV is very good at measuring the composition of the audience but as the medium continues to fragment it will come under increasing pressure measuring all the fragments of that quantum. Fortunately there are sophisticated statistical data techniques that allow this to be done with a great deal of robustness, which I suspect will start rolling out over the next few years.
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I agree with Tom (and everyone else): Sherlock is brilliant, I was transfixed.
Tim, the ratings must be off – surely no one actually watches that mean-spirited Idol wannabe…
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Hi Renee,
I’m a fan of Sherlock too. Mind you, my family in the UK kindly recorded it for me when it went out in Britain some weeks ago and popped the DVD in the post. So I was one potential viewer who didn’t watch last night. Considering this was the work of the people behind Doctor Who, I suspect the potential audience was very much the type likely to turn to BitTorrent.
As I mentioned in another post, another factor may be the rise of the digital channels. Big Bang Theory rates well for Go at the same time.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Oh god the second episode of sherlock was bad though… just watched it online. Apparantly according to wikipedia the 2nd episode was directed by someone completely different….
I hope with the return of the original director for episode three it will return to its former glory
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