Collateral draws 3.2m to BBC2

ITV won the battle of the John Simm dramas last night, but relative to its regular channel performance, BBC2 put on the most impressive show.

The opener of David Hare’s four-part drama more than doubled BBC2’s slot average of 1.5m (7.1%) for the past 12 months to deliver the channel’s best drama performance since Line of Duty’s 4.1m (20.7%) overnight audience in April 2016.

It was also BBC2’s fifth best drama outing of the past four years, behind Line of Duty, Wolf Hall, 2015’s Banished and a Holby City episode transferred from BBC1.

The Forge’s drama, which starred Simm alongside Carey Mulligan and Billie Piper, skewed slightly older than BBC2’s slot average, with 48% of viewers aged 65 or over, compared with the typical 41%.

ITV debuted Doctor Foster writer Mike Bartlett’s Trauma to 4.9m (23.6%), hitting the slot average and outperforming the 3.5m (16.2%) debut of Next of Kin, which occupied the slot over the previous six weeks.

Tall Story Pictures’ psychological thriller, which stars Simm and Adrian Lester, is stripped in the same slot over the next three nights.

Opposite, two Lion TV docs went head-to-head – and ended up neck-and-neck.

The World’s Most Luxurious Airline, Channel 4’s one-off look at Singapore Airlines, won out by a whisper with 1.98m (9.6%), beating the 1.6m (7.5%) slot average.

BBC1’s Mary Beard doc Julius Caesar Revealed pulled in 1.96m (9.5%), a far cry from the previous Monday’s big-hitting Silent Witness 5.8m (27.9%) and well below the 3.2m (15.6%) slot average.

On Channel 5, The X Files fell by 260,000 on last week’s opener to average 580,000 (2.8%), according to Barb data provided by overnights.tv.

Over on ITV2 at 9pm, the second edition of reality show Survival of the Fittest drew 380,000 (1.8%), well down from the previous night’s 664,000 (3.5%) and the slot average of 600,000 (2.9%).

The performance enabled E4’s Celebs Go Dating to pull ahead with 431,000 (2.1%).