Britain's Got Talent peaks at 12 million

By Maisie McCabe, brandrepublic.com, Monday, 02 April 2012 09:15AM

'Britain's Got Talent' had a peak audience of 12 million on ITV1 on Saturday, beating BBC One's 'The Voice', which fought back to outshine its rival at 8pm when the two shows went head-to-head for 15 minutes.

Britain's Got Talent: singer-songwriter Ryan gets through the first round of auditions

According to unofficial overnight figures, ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ had an average audience of 9.90 million viewers, a 39.9% share, between 8pm and 9pm on ITV1 and ITV1 HD on Saturday night. 518,600 viewers watched the show on ITV1 +1.

Including the contribution from ITV1+1, ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ had an average audience of 10.4 million viewers, a 42% share, and peaked at 12.6 million, a 50% share of the TV watching audience.

‘Britain’s Got Talent’ is sponsored by Virgin Media and this year Simon Cowell has returned as a full-time member of the judging panel, alongside Amanda Holden, David Walliams and Alesha Dixon.

In comparison, the second episode of ‘The Voice’ had a peak audience of 10.17 million viewers and an average audience of 8.43 million viewers between 7pm and 8.15pm on BBC One and BBC One HD.

Both ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ and ‘The Voice’ comfortably increased their audiences from the previous week’s launch shows when they delivered average audiences of 9.31 million viewers and 8.43 million viewers respectively.

Between 8pm and 8.15pm this Saturday, when ‘The Voice’ and ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ were both on air, BBC One, across standard and high definition, had the biggest audience with 9.83 million viewers to ITV 1’s 7.48 million (on SD and HD).

‘Take Me Out’, the dating show presented by Paddy McGuinness, had an average audience of 4.56 million viewers between 9pm and 10pm on ITV1 and ITV1 HD, a 20.5% share. An additional 227,000 watched the programme on ITV1+1.

Follow Maisie McCabe on Twitter @MaisieMcCabe

This article was first published on brandrepublic.com