Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell spooks 4.5m

Cuba Pictures’ magical seven part series, based on the novel by Susanna Clarke, struggled to match the debuts of previous BBC1 Sunday evening dramas Poldark and The Casual Vacancy.

It was well down on the 6.6m (27.5%) who watched the first episode of JK Rowling adaptation, The Casual Vacancy in February and the 6.9m (29) who flocked to the launch of Poldark in March.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was also shy of the channel’s 5.1m (21.8%) slot average for the past 12 months.

Some 52% of the audience was 55 years old and above.

The launch ep was beaten at 9pm by ITV’s Home Fires, which continued to burn brightly for ITV with 4.8m (21.7%). This was narrowly down on the 5m (22%) who tuned in last week.

Opposite, on BBC2’s three-part factual series The Detectives hunted down an audience of 1.4m (6.3%).

Minnow Films’ stripped series, about the work of a Manchester police unit that investigates sexual crimes, was unable to match the 1.7m (7.3%) slot average, according to Barb data provided by overnights.tv.

However it outperformed Channel 4 one-off doc Grayson Perry’s Dream House.

That film informed 1m viewers (4.5%), well ahead of the 641,000 (4.1%) who tuned in to the opener of the artist’s previous C4 series, Who Are You?, on Wednesday 22 October in a 10pm slot.

Big Brother: Timebomb rounded out the 9pm slot on Channel 5 with 1.1m (5.1%).

Eleven Films’ series bowed out on a series low, spooking an overnight average of 676,000 (3%) across its three parts.

It dwarfed the slot average of 105,000 (0.5%) for the channel, which has now dropped original commissioning.