It was billed as the great election switch off to encourage younger viewers to vote, with 1.5 million people switching on E4 on Thursday only to find that The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother had disappeared from the schedule.
Channel 4 pulled the plug on E4 in an unparalleled election stunt, replacing its regular programming with “Darren”, the man supposedly responsible for keeping E4 on air.
The channel’s daytime audience peaked with 36,000 viewers, although it’s not known how many of these – or the 1.5 million who tuned in at some point during the 12-hour shutdown – took it as a prompt to go and vote.
If E4’s audience is overwhelmingly Conservative, it might explain the unexpected election result, although there is no evidence to suggest this. And if a polling company said so, why would we believe them?
The peak audience – impressive for a channel effectively showing nothing – came towards the end of the channel closure and is likely to consist of Hollyoaks fans tuning in to see their favourite soap, which was the first of its regular programmes yesterday at 7pm.
Channel 4’s “alternative” night of election programmes, including Jeremy Paxman, David Mitchell and a special edition of Gogglebox, beat ITV in the ratings for the second general election in a row, averaging 1.2 million viewers, an 8.9% share, between 9pm and 2am.
It had a peak audience of 2.4 million for the start of Gogglebox at 10pm.
