Four years ago Big Brother was cancelled (or not renewed) by Network Ten in favour of launching a new cooking show, MasterChef, in its timeslot seven nights a week in 2009. This blogger will admit that he thought the show destined to fail. Who knew it would go on to draw some of the biggest TV audiences of the years, run for at least four more years and spawn spin-offs of the Celebrity, Junior, and Allstars varieties? And who knew that four years later, MasterChef and Big Brother would run against each other in the same timeslot on different networks?
The Big Brother 2012 Launch show peaked at 2.1 million viewers last night-- an excellent figure in today's multi-channel world. The average for the 90 minute show was 1.61 million viewers. How those figures level out across tonight's first live special, regular Daily Shows and Evictions and Nominations is yet to be seen. Given Everybody Dance Now's dismal launch and follow-up show, I'd say BB has jumped the first ratings hurdle-- people are interested. Now to keep them that way.
More interestingly, MasterChef Allstars, which premiered right before the crazy ratings fortnight of The Olympics, only managed 702,000 viewers last night. That was down on Sunday night's figures against the final Olympic events of 779,000.
With MasterChef wrapping up this Sunday night, let's see how things shake out.
