ITV’s News at Ten ratings took a tumble on Tuesday night with almost four times as many people watching the rival BBC1 10pm bulletin.
The relaunched ITV bulletin pulled in an average of 1.2 million viewers, with an audience share of almost 8%, compared with BBC1’s audience of 4.7 million.
News at Ten anchor Tom Bradby is on annual leave so his place was taken by Julie Etchingham. But the main reason for the relatively low audience appears not to be who presents the bulletin or any kind of “Bradby boost” as it scored over 2 million on Monday night.
It inherited 2.2 million (2.4 million including ITV+1) from Car Crash Britain: Caught on Camera, a new series which looked at the testimony of victims of road accidents
If ITV+1’s figures are included for News at Ten its audience rises to 1.4 million. Overall in January News at Ten has been averaging 1.97 million – which is up by around 200,000 on last January.
However, Tuesdays appear to be a bit of a blackspot for News at Ten with it scoring 1.3 million (including ITV+1) on the last three Tuesdays of January.
Since Bradby took over from co-hosts Mark Austin and Etchingham as the main presenter last autumn with a relaunched show, the BBC and ITV have engaged in another round of the long-running battle of the bongs.
Bradby is understood to have lobbied the government over whether or not the BBC should also run its news at 10pm, while in November rival Huw Edwards poked fun at his ITV counterpart on Facebook for “conspiring to lose” the 4.2 million viewers who had watched the “excellent Doc Martin” at 9pm, and observing that the BBC attracted more than twice ITV’s audience for its 10pm bulletin.
