The great TV face-off between BBC1’s The Great British Bake Off and ITV’s live edition of Coronation Street ended in a dead heat with 8.4 million viewers each.
The head to head between the two big hitters on Wednesday followed a renewal of hostilities between the channels over competitive scheduling.
The Great British Bake Off, in its usual 8pm slot, had 8.4 million viewers, a 34.6% share of the audience between 8pm and 9pm,
The hour-long live Coronation Street, to mark ITV’s 60th birthday, also had 8.4 million viewers, a 36.3% share, broadcast 30 minutes earlier than the Mary Berry cookery show, from 7.30pm to 8.30pm.
The soap, up about 1.5 million viewers from its regular edition last Wednesday, took a sizeable bite out of the normal audience for Bake Off, which last week had 10 million viewers, a 43.9% share of the audience.
It is BBC1’s biggest show, and was last year pipped only by England’s defeat by Uruguay in the football World Cup as the most watched show of 2014.
The dark arts of scheduling has once again become an issue after ITV accused the BBC of using Strictly Come Dancing to “clip the wings” of the revamped X Factor.
The BBC responded by saying it played its shows when licence fee payers most wanted to see them, and said ITV had scheduled its soaps against EastEnders in the past.
To fans of three decimal places, Coronation Street was marginally ahead in the overnight data, with 8.369 million viewers ahead of The Great British Bake Off’s 8.366 million, a lead of 3,000 viewers.
But the soap’s audience also includes ITV+1, a timeshifted channel not available to BBC1. Without it, Coronation Street’s audience falls to 8.1 million.
For fans of this sort of thing who are still not satisfied, in the 30 minutes when they were on at the same time, Coronation Street had 8 million viewers against Bake Off’s 7.7 million.
