Top Gear drives up 1.68m viewers
Nine's reputedly big fee in hijacking Top Gear from SBS appears to have paid off with a huge 1.68m viewers tuning in for the new episode last night.
- Published by David Knox
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Nine’s reputedly big fee in hijacking Top Gear from SBS appears to have paid off with a huge 1.68m viewers tuning in for the new episode last night.
The show was the #1 programme for Tuesday, driving right across My Kitchen Rules (1.21m) and The Biggest Loser / Bondi Rescue (722,000 / 966,000).
With all the advertisements Top Gear fans are questioning whether the episode had been trimmed. The BBC delivers a 52 minute international version to its clients. Nine maintains it didn’t edit the show, but it certainly dumped the credits as it shifted gears to the Winter Olympics special which had already run twice on SBS. That episode drove home with 1.24m. Nine will need to be aware it could jeopardise the brand in moving it into the broad, middle lane of television’s highway. Attention to detail is one of the reasons the show became a hit in the first place.
Together with Vancouver Gold highlights (905,000) the night was easily won by Nine.
But TEN had cause to smile with NCIS winning its hour on 1.36m viewers although Bondi Rescue was seemingly dragged down from Loser’s lukewarm lead-in. Grey’s Anatomy sunk to 888,000 for Seven.
Hot Seat (620,000) had a comfy lead over Deal or No Deal (523,000) while Today (370,000) again beat Sunrise (344,000).
Kevin McCloud’s Grand Tour travelled with 746,000 for ABC1, much bigger than its Foreign Correspondent lead-in of 559,000. The highly-underrated Big Love was left with 139,000 on SBS ONE, but next week Insight returns.
54 Responses
Man, I’ve already seen these episodes!! Does this mean Nine is only repeating series that hve already played on BCC Knowledge and SBS?
Top Gear in the UK is shown in HD but Nine’s transmission looked upscaled (yes the in car camera’s are SD but the Helicopter shots were fantastic in HD … just not on Nine
After this little experiement expect the viewers to keep voting with their mice!
@ stan… nine will never hand over hbo programs…. dream on !
Top Gear was trimmed for sure. On BBC2 in the UK it is 58-59 mins without ads, this has been this way since I’ve been watching it from there. It’s a commercial channel, did we expect anything else from nine?