Richard and Judy book special fails to impress

Richard and Judy's Best Kids' Books

• Increase image
• View all images

Richard & Judy's Best Kids' Books only attracted 648,000 viewers (2.9%) at 8pm last night.

Channel 4 trailed the terrestrial pack at 8pm last night as Richard & Judy's Best Kids' Books only attracted 648,000 viewers (2.9%).

The hour-long show, which was part of the channel's Lost for Words literacy season, could only hit a peak audience of 732,000 (3.4%) in the first 15 minutes. A further 26,000 (0.12%) saw the programme on C4's time-shifted channel C4+1.

While the show may not have been aimed at a mass audience, it was still way short of the channel's slot average for the year to date of 2.3m (10.9%).

The book show was 1m viewers behind Five's live coverage of Everton's Uefa Cup tie against the Greek side Larissa. The entire coverage, between 7.30pm and 10pm drew 1.6m (7.4%), 300,000 viewers above the slot average so far this year.

Even further ahead was the second part of BBC2's The Truth about Property with the 60 minute show at 8pm interesting 2.4m (11%).

ITV1 managed to scrape past the winning post at 8pm with The Bill securing 4.9m (22%). Not too far behind though was BBC1's drama Waterloo Road, in the same slot, with 4.6m (20.7%).

Blowing in the wind

ITV1's drama series The Whistleblowers made a slight recovering from the previous week, but still remained on the critical list.

Last night's penultimate instalment gained 2.9m (13.8%) over an hour, a rise of 400,000 on the previous week. However, the drama was still well below the channel's slot average of 3.6m (16.2%).

BBC1 managed to claim the spoils at 9pm with 3.1m (14.7%) watching the Panorama special Kidnapped: the Alan Johnston Story.

BBC2's comedy The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle also made an improvement week-on-week with 1.3m (6.2%) watching the Jennifer Saunders-fronted show. The previous week 930,000 (4.2%) watched.

C4 more than doubled its audience at 9pm after the Richard and Judy book show with the final instalment of Last Chance Kids gaining 1.5m (7.3%).

All hours shares for Thursday 25 October 2007: BBC1 – 20.8%, ITV1 – 17.9%, BBC2 – 8.2%, C4 – 7.3%, Five – 5.3%, multichannel – 40.1%.

Peaktime (6pm to 10.30pm) shares: BBC1 – 23%, ITV1 – 19.8%, BBC2 – 8.8%, C4 – 6.2%, Five – 5.9%, multichannel – 36.1%.