TELEPRINTER:With January traditionally proving one of the biggest months of the year for television viewing – we're too broke or too busy detoxing to do anything else – both RTÉ and TV3 did their best to suck in strong audience figures for their flagship shows earlier this week.
As the back-to-school gloom descended on Sunday evening, RTÉ won an average of 605,400 viewers for the launch of the second series of The Voice of Ireland, which has perhaps benefited from TV3’s decision not to broadcast ITV’s reality contest Dancing on Ice this year.
The new series of At Your Service, in which hoteliers John and Francis Brennan do a TV makeover of independent hospitality businesses, attracted 595,100 viewers, while RTÉ One’s night continued with an average of 585,800 viewers switching on the new series of restaurant drama RAW.
Monday was TV3’s big night with the premiere of its first original drama, Deception, securing an average viewership of 311,000 in its 10pm-11pm time slot, with 506,000 people tuning in at some point over the course of the corpse-endowed first episode.
These are figures that TV3 will be hoping it can sustain and ideally build on over the next five weeks of the soapy Galway-set drama’s run.
Earlier, Celebrity Come Dine with Me Ireland took in 308,000 viewers up against the Nine O’Clock News (474,300 viewers), while Dublin Wives lured 229,000 from 9.30pm.
Back on RTÉ One, Hector Goes Holy was the choice of 448,100 people from 21.35pm on Monday, while from 10.25pm, 269,400 watched Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte outline his thesis that the media is too negative about politics on the soon-to-be-rebranded The Frontline.
