The debut of Michael McIntyre’s Big Show on BBC1 on Saturday pulled in 4.8 million viewers for the BBC, comfortably beating ITV’s new family gameshow Bang on the Money.
The 4.8 million audience for McIntyre’s new series was slightly more than the 4.5 million who tuned into to the final episode of The Voice, which is moving to ITV from next year. It was comfortably ahead of the average of 3.2 million who watched Bang on the Money, which is fronted by DJs Rickie and Melvin.
However, both programmes were put in the shade by the second episode of Britain’s Got Talent more than 1.5 million more viewers than its debut the previous weekend. The second episode of the Simon Cowell talent contest took almost half of all TV viewing in the 8pm slot, pulling in an average of 10.3 million, making it the top rated show so far this year.
It was a marked improvement on the 8.8 million who tuned into the series opener which, despite easily outclassing the final of The Voice on BBC1, was far less popular than the 2015 series debut, which drew more than 11 million viewers.
McIntyre’s new Saturday evening slot is the latest attempt to transfer his huge standup success into other formats for TV, following the one-season run of his chatshow in 2014.
However, reviews of the opening episode, which included guests such as former Spice Girl Geri Horner (formerly Halliwell) and UK Hip Hop artist Tiny Tempah, have not been favourable, with the Daily Mail giving it two out of five stars and saying it fails in its attempt to emulate Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeway on ITV.
