Another week and another ratings round-up. Now I’ll get the bad news out the way. Yes, unfortunately for the beloved egotist with an overinflated opinion of himself, his show is down on the previous episode. But that is enough about Alan Sugar and his BBC One show The Apprentice, we are here to talk about Arnold Rimmer and his Dave show Red Dwarf.
Give & Take came through in the overnight ratings with a figure of 624,000 viewers across Dave and Dave Ja Vu. Is it time to panic? Well no, for several reasons. The first reason is that Red Dwarf is now airing in one of the most competitive slots on British television. The Apprentice launched in the Thursday 9pm slot and was massively down on previous recent series openers, not least because of the competitive timeslot. The Apprentice also pulled down the ratings of everything else on the night including BBC Two’s The Fall and Channel Four’s Hunted. The second reason not to panic is because there are more ways to watch Red Dwarf than on Dave and Dave Ja Vu which brings us nicely to the consolidated ratings for Twentica and the UKTV Play viewers for Twentica and Samsara.
The consolidated figures for Twentica on Dave and Dave Ja Vu comes in at 1,456,000 viewers. This figure includes people who watched on the night, people who recorded and watched later in the week and people who watched on Sky On Demand in the seven days after the first broadcast. A very good figure for a digital channel which puts it on a par with ITV2’s hit show Celebrity Juice which is a good parameter for successful digital channel ratings.
The UKTV Play figures have also been made available by the BARB. The service usually achieved around 5000 streams for new programming and below 1000 for older programming. Twentica was streamed 20,505 times across the first 4 days of being available. In the first 11 days of being available, Twentica was streamed a mammoth 41,079 times, putting it head and shoulders above anything that has ever been on the UKTV Play service. Samsara achieved a figure of 16,860 streams in the first 4 days of being available. These figures only include people watching through the website and on the app.
The success of Red Dwarf XI is gauged on many different parameters. Whilst the overnight figures are down on previous series which would otherwise be a cause for concern (though they are still healthy figures for a digital channel), Red Dwarf is excelling in all other areas. It has successfully pulled a much bigger audience to the UKTV Play service and it is pulling in the viewers on catch up.
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