The press is always talking about TV audience figures, and commonly fails to understand them at all. I’ve often railed against the ludicrous claims perpetuated around the football World Cup or the Olympics, so it was quite interesting to see this story from earlier in the year.
But let’s get a little more current. There’s an article in today’s Londonpaper that I saw on the train this evening that said the following:
“18 Million Watch Dancing
“Strictly Come Dancing put the smile back on the faces of beleaguered BBC bosses today after pulling in 18.1 million fans over the weekend.”
Er. No it didn’t. The paper reports 9.9m watching Saturday’s show, and 8.8m watching on Sunday. Except Media Guardian reports the figure as actually being 8.2m on Saturday and 7.7m on Sunday. The reporter for the Londonpaper was probably taking the shows’ peak minutes rather than overall average. In any case, you can’t simply add one number to the other to get an overall figure. These are not different people. Nearly everyone who watched the results show on Sunday will have undoubtedly watched the main programme on Saturday. It’s just a basic misunderstanding of maths.
I’ll be fair though, and highlight a different story, that I was at first very dubious about, but turned out to be remarkably prescient. Friday’s Evening Standard, amongst other media outlets talked about 30m watching in Britain and France. Instinctively, I thought that this was nonsense. But actually, it was pretty much spot on – with 12 million watching in Britain and 18 million watching in France. ITV’s going to be laughing all the way to the bank this Saturday.
So what will the final get? I’d guess that it’ll be somewhere between 14 and 16m. That figure, however, doesn’t include anyone watching it at a bar or club. You can add a good number onto that figure for an accurate idea – particularly given that the game’s on a Saturday night.