The BBC’s War and Peace lost 1 million viewers on its second outing, attracting 5.3 million viewers on Sunday night.
BBC1’s drama, one of the most expensive the corporation has funded at about £2m an episode, saw a significant fall in viewing compared with the 6.3 million who tuned in to the launch episode.
War and Peace was beaten on Sunday by Antiques Roadshow (5.3 million), Still Open All Hours (7 million) and Countryfile (7.4 million).
The drama’s share of total TV audience between 9pm and 10pm fell from 25% to 22% week on week as viewers switched off or moved to other channels.
BBC1 says that consolidated figures, which includes those who recorded the drama and watched it in the seven days after it fiurst aired, pushed the first episode up by almost 2 million viewers to 8.4 million.
The only real beneficiary of the decline in overnight viewing of the second episode of War and Peace appears to have been ITV’s Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour, which increased its audience from 4.8 million to 5.1 million for its second episode.
Endeavour drew a 21% share of total TV viewing between 8pm and 10pm.
ITV’s good news was tempered by a 300,000 fall in viewing of its drama Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands on its second episode.
The TV retelling of the epic poem drew 2.3 million viewers and a 10.5% share of audience between 7pm and 8pm, down from its 2.6 million debut.
Channel 4’s drama Deutschland 83 also lost viewers, with episode two attracting 1.1 million, down from its 1.5 million launch.
However, Channel 4 said that the first episode of the subtitled German series about the cold war has become the highest-rated foreign language drama on British TV on the basis of its consolidated figures.
The consolidated figures, which includes those who recorded the drama and watched it in the seven days after it first aired, gave Deutschland 83 an audience of 2.25 million.
It narrowly beat the 2.21 million consolidated audience managed by the launch of French drama The Returned, which also aired on Channel 4, in June 2013.
