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| Chris Evans’ Top Gear loses a third of its audience | Chris Evans’ Top Gear loses a third of its audience |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Chris Evans’ Top Gear suffered a big drop in its viewing figures for its second episode, drawing what is thought to be its lowest audience for at least a decade. | |
| The BBC motoring show – worth £50m a year to the BBC in worldwide sales – lost a third of its audience, pulling in just 2.8 million viewers, a 14% share of the audience on Sunday night. | |
| Evans had previously said he would be “disappointed” if the show drew less than 5 million ahead of its high profile return following the axing of Jeremy Clarkson last year. | Evans had previously said he would be “disappointed” if the show drew less than 5 million ahead of its high profile return following the axing of Jeremy Clarkson last year. |
| Related: BBC defends Top Gear following audience complaints | Related: BBC defends Top Gear following audience complaints |
| The presenter took to Twitter last week after the first episode drew an overnight audience of 4.3 million viewers, saying it had many more on catchup and on the BBC’s iPlayer. | The presenter took to Twitter last week after the first episode drew an overnight audience of 4.3 million viewers, saying it had many more on catchup and on the BBC’s iPlayer. |
| More bad news for the Top Gear haters: consolidated figures for the first episode of the new series have now past 5.6 million and counting. | |
| The consolidated figures, including people who recorded it and watched it in the following seven days, are expected today. | The consolidated figures, including people who recorded it and watched it in the following seven days, are expected today. |
| Last night’s overnight audience is lower than the 3.1 million average for the very first Top Gear series featuring Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond broadcast in 2002. James May joined the pair a series later. | |
| That figure is thought to include consolidated ratings although the proportion of people recording the show to watch it later was far lower a decade ago. | |
| It is also just over half the 5.1 million who watched the last regular episode to feature the show’s former presenting lineup before Clarkson’s suspension following a “fracas” with a producer last March. | |
| However, there were also mitigating factors for last night’s low overnight audience, including the warm weather and ITV’s celebrity football show Socceraid, which averaged 3.9 million across four hours from 6pm to 10pm. | |
| One senior TV industry executive said it was “hold your nerve time” for the show which is two episodes into its first six-part run post-Clarkson. | |
| Top Gear is BBC2’s biggest show but, more importantly than that, it is the biggest earner for the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, watched in more than 80 countries within 72 hours of its broadcast in the UK. | |
| The BBC was moved to defend the show after reports that 370 viewers had complained about its new incarnation - perhaps predictable after the departure of its long-running presenting team - but also that it received the lowest audience appreciation scores of any BBC2 show last week. | |
| Evans and the show have come in for sustained criticism in some sections of the media, in particular the Sun, which led its front page on Saturday with a report that the show was in a “new crisis” after it apparently used canned laughter. | |
| Evans, the Radio 2 breakfast DJ, described the tabloid criticism as “facile and fictitious”. | |
| Speaking at the programme’s launch two weeks ago, he said press stories, which alleged he did not get along with co-presenter Matt LeBlanc, and his behaviour was “out of control”, were “nonsense”. | |
| “None of it was true, but there’s no point saying that, there’s just no point,” he said. | |
| “In many ways my job for this year has been not only to make this show but to take all the shit, which was going to happen. I knew I was going to get the shit kicked out of me.” |