Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear toppled Doctor Who from the top of the BBC’s iPlayer Christmas charts as on-demand viewing continued to boom, up 25% year on year.
There were more than 2m requests to view the first part of Top Gear’s controversial Patagonia special, broadcast on BBC2 on 27 December.
It was a sign of the changing way viewers watch TV that the on-demand iPlayer audience was nearly half the programme’s overnight TV audience of 4.7m.
There were another 1.5m requests for the second half of the Top Gear special on iPlayer which aired on BBC2 a day later.
Doctor Who, which topped the festive iPlayer charts for the last two years, slipped to ninth spot with 1m requests during a nine-day period over Christmas, according to figures published by the BBC on Wednesday.
It echoed the drop in the TV audience for the Doctor Who Christmas special, which fell to 8.3 million from 11.1 million viewers in 2013, the biggest drop of any of the most popular Christmas Day shows.
The TV and on-demand audience for the previous year’s Doctor Who will have been boosted by the Time Lord’s much anticipated regeneration from Matt Smith into Peter Capaldi. But the iPlayer statistics capped a grim few days for the BBC1 show after Capaldi missed out on a nomination at ITV’s National Television Awards this week.
Top Gear took two of the top three spots in a festive iPlayer top 10 which also featured the first part of the Miranda finale, The Apprentice final, David Walliams’ adaptation The Boy in the Dress and four episodes of EastEnders, including the Christmas Day edition.
The BBC reported a record-breaking 227m iPlayer requests across the whole of December (excluding people using the device on Sky and Virgin Media), up 25% on December 2013.
It reflected the continued surge in popularity of smartphones and tablets, with a total of 30m downloads of the BBC’s iPlayer app since its launch including 150,000 on Christmas Day.
Victoria Jaye, head of TV content for the BBC iPlayer, said on a BBC blog there had been a “significant surge in BBC iPlayer usage, as people all over the country un-wrap new devices and take the opportunity to enjoy our terrific range of programmes, at a time that suits them”. The BBC said it was also a record-breaking Christmas week with a total of 54.5m iPlayer requests.
Christmas week on the iPlayer - top 20 programmes *
1 Top Gear Patagonia Special, Part 1, 2.08 million
2 EastEnders, Christmas Day, 1.69 million
3 Top Gear, Patagonia Special, Part 2, 1.55 million
4 EastEnders, Boxing Day, 1.43 million
5 The Apprentice final, 21 December, 1.31 million
6 Miranda, Christmas Day, 1.26 million
7 EastEnders, 23 December, 1.15 million
8 EastEnders, 24 December, 1.11 million
9 Doctor Who, Christmas Day, 1.07 million
10 The Boy In The Dress, Boxing Day, 1.06 million
11 EastEnders, 22 December, 1.06 million
12 Mrs Brown’s Boys, Christmas Day, 976,900
13 EastEnders, 29 December, 971,800
14 Call The Midwife, Christmas Day, 948,800
15 The Wrong Mans, part 1, 22 December, 655,000
16 EastEnders, 30 December, 643,300
17 Not Going Out, 24 December, 494,900
18 Gangsta Granny, 30 December, 488,100
19 Match of the Day, Boxing Day, 470,900
20 The Wrong Mans, part 2, 23 December, 454,500
* iPlayer requests, 22 to 30 December 2014
