A Thoroughly British Summer of Sport
After England’s capitulation at the Football World Cup and Andy Murray’s defeat at Wimbledon... you would have thought that the Great British public would have had enough of sport for a while!
However, this week saw the culmination of Wimbledon, the start of the Tour de France (in Yorkshire …), the continuation of the World Cup and the small matter of the British Grand Prix. With the weather being largely good how would TV audiences fare?
Well the answer has to be pretty well…. no one would have been more upset to see England out of the World Cup than ITV’s chief executive Adam Crozier. Well, he would have been very happy with Friday night’s Brazil v Colombia performance which pulled in an average audience of 8.7m, with a 42% share of viewing. The canny Scot may have allowed himself a wee chuckle when he saw the viewing figures, hopefully his bonus won’t be too badly affected!
BBC1’s showing of the Holland v Costa Rica match on Saturday night did not fare quite as well, though still averaged 8.2m, a 46.2% share. Of course, had England progressed then these figures would have been substantially higher. The England v Uruguay match peaked at over 20m viewers, with a huge 66.7% share of viewing. By the time of the Costa Rica game the audience had dwindled to an average of 7.8m (albeit with a 1700 kick off) with only 46.5% of TV viewers deciding to watch the final throes of the campaign.
Coverage of the “Grand Depart” was simulcast on ITV and ITV4 and pulled a combined audience across Saturday of almost 2m, with an average share of over 21% between 1030 & 1700. ITV in isolation delivered an average of over 1m viewers, up from 470,000 the previous week. The previous year’s coverage, with the race starting in Corsica, delivered an average audience of 164,000, 1.9% share (ITV4 only). Sunday’s coverage didn’t fare quite so well, possibly due to Mark Cavendish’s early exit, though more likely the competition that it faced. A combined audience of 1.7m viewed the coverage, 14.8% share. Again ITV have to be very happy with this performance.
So what of the competition? The Wimbledon Ladies final on BBC1 delivered an average audience of 2.1m, a 21.3% share. This is down substantially on the previous year’s final, 3.34m & 39% respectively. The coverage did clash with the qualifying for the Grand Prix, which ran on both BBC2 and Sky Sports F1. BBC2 clearly won this battle, with 1.67m viewers (17.9%) v Sky’s 305,000 (3.3%).
Of course 2013 saw a British winner at Wimbledon and so this year’s men’s final was never going to fare as well. Last year’s coverage drew an average audience of 12.1m to BBC1 (a 72.4% share), peaking at 17.8m. This year’s final delivered an average of 5.27m, a 35.9% share, peaking at 8.7m. This is very impressive considering that this year it was up against coverage of the British Grand Prix. Lewis Hamilton’s effort to restore some pride to British sport was viewed by over 3.5m people on average, peaking at 4.9m. Almost 85% of this viewing was on BBC2.
There is no doubt that both Wimbledon & Le Tour affected audience delivery on the Formula One with the combined average being down by almost 20%.
Something for Bernie to ponder …....
- Steve









