A record audience of almost 3 million viewers watched Hilary Benn on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show the morning he was sacked from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet – 10 times the number who watched Robert Peston’s rival ITV Sunday morning show.
The Marr show had 2.72 million viewers from 9am on Sunday with the former shadow foreign secretary a 5.30am booking following his early hours sacking which was followed by a string of Labour frontbench resignations.
It underlined the BBC1 programme’s dominance over ITV’s Peston on Sunday, which starts an hour later but could only manage 270,000 viewers, a 3.6% share.
The Andrew Marr Show as up nearly a million viewers on last week’s 1.8 million, Peston also up, but only marginally, from 232,000.
Andrew Neil’s BBC1 Sunday morning show, Sunday Politics, also benefited from viewer interest in the fallout from the Brexit vote, with 1.8 million viewers, a 24.5% share across more than two hours from 10.05am.
It was more than double the 800,000 viewers who watched the Neil show last week.
Audiences for the main evening television news bulletins on Sunday were similar or down last week, but Saturday night’s 7.10pm news on BBC1 had 6.2 million viewers, more than a million up on the 5.1 million who watched the teatime bulletin last week.
However, audiences for news bulletins are subject to the vagaries of the programmes that they follow, with BBC1’s Saturday night news following Wales’ 1-0 Euro 2016 win over Northern Ireland, which averaged 8.5 million viewers.
Friday night’s BBC1 10pm news was also up on last week, 4.6 million against 3.8 million seven days earlier.
BBC1’s Sunday Question Time special had 3.7 million viewers from 6.30pm. A Saturday night special edition of Newsnight on BBC2 was watched by 1.3 million viewers from 8.30pm.
