Crime season high for ITV

By Robin Parker | 10 November 2017

THURSDAY: Susanna Reid doc helps ITV win the 9pm hour

The Murder of Becky Watts: Police Tapes (ITV) 9pm-10pm 3.8m (20.7%)

The Susanna Reid-fronted investigation into the story behind 16 year-old Becky Watts’ disappearance in 2015, and the subsequent discovery of her murder, pulled in the biggest audience so far of ITV’s Thursday night Crime & Punishment season.

Though just shy of the 3.9m slot average, The Garden’s film was marginally ahead of the 20% average share after it hit a peak of 4.3m.

The best-performing of the previous four editions of the strand, which has featured contributions from Gordon Ramsay and Ross Kemp, was the opening doc, An Hour to Catch a Killer with Trevor McDonald, which attracted 3.4m (17.6%).

It continues next week with Reid’s Good Morning Britain co-host contribution, Serial Killer with .

Opposite, the first of ’s four-part doc series Trump: An American Dream, launched with 1.4m (7.4%). 72 Films’ show, which was co-produced with Netflix, was just ahead of the 1.3m (6.5%) slot average. Elsewhere at 9pm, the second episode of BBC2’s Exodus: Our Journey Continues stayed steady on 490,000 (2.7%), while BBC1’s The Week The Landlords Moved In attracted 2.1m (11.4%).

The final episode of the second series of Rich House, Poor House averaged 1.3m (7.1%) on Channel 5.

Meanwhile on Sky 1, part two of Big Talk’s comedy-drama Living the Dream attracted 228,000 (1.2%) over the 9pm hour.

Part one averaged 131,000 (0.7%) last week, with a further 139,000 (9.9%) who watched, or recorded, a 2am premiere. Together with a Saturday 9pm repeat, the debut reached a total overnight audience of 320,000.

Sam Smith at the BBC (BBC1) 8pm-9pm 1.8m (9%)

The Stay with Me singer’s hour-long showcase, in which he performed with the BBC Concert Orchestra, proved a bigger draw than last week’s Harry Styles at the BBC, which drew 1.4m (7.3%) in the same 8pm time slot.

It was a hit with 16-24s, who made up 8% of viewers compared to BBC1’s 4.5% slot average, according to Barb data provided by overnights.tv.

ITV won the 8pm slot with Emmerdale (5.7m / 28.9%), followed by Paul O’Grady’s For The Love of Dogs (4.1m / 20.8%) at 8.30pm.

Angry, White and American (C4) 10pm-11pm 740,000 (5.5%)

Sugar Films’ one-off doc, in which journalist Gary Younge travelled across America to learn how Donald Trump won over white voters, was just below C4’s 780,000 (5.4%) slot average.

Click to go behind the scenes on Angry, White and American

Opposite, C5’s four-part nunnery life-swap format Bad Habits, Holy Orders wrapped up with a series low of 533,000 (3.9%).

Crackit Productions’ series pulled in an average of 678,000 (4.9%), just beating the 640,000 (4.5%) slot average.