Ratings Roundup: History beats spelling

Alan Titchmarsh's British Isles: A Natural History continued to pull in the ratings last night, early figures show.

The series averaged a hefty 6.34 million viewers and a 26.5% audience share in the 9pm hour, easily winning the slot. On ITV1, The Great British Spelling Test appealed to 5.27 million (23.1%).

Earlier, What Not To Wear kept steady at 5.01 million (21.8%), albeit still behind ITV cop drama The Bill with 7.08 million (30.7%).

Channel 4's property block was another ratings success, starting off at 8pm with 3.05 million (13.2%) for Property Ladder and rising to 3.45 million (14.4%) for Grand Designs Abroad in the next hour.

It was a lacklustre night for BBC Two, meanwhile, with just 1.27 million tuning in for Desert: The Challenge at 8pm and 1.47 million (6.1%) for terrorism documentary the Power Of Nightmares.

On Five, Jennie Bond's Royals averaged 1.17 million (5.1%) at 8pm but the big ratings came from a repeat of sci-fi movie The Matrix, which averaged 2.10 million (11.2%) between 9pm and 11.35pm.

BBC Three enjoyed another strong night thanks to the movie Top Gun with 375,000 viewers and a 2.8% multichannel share, while a repeat of Holiday Showdown drew 171,000 (1.2%) to ITV2 from 9pm.

On LivingTV, Queer Eye For the Straight Guy UK managed a respectable 113,000 (0.8%), a far cry from the 12,000 who saw the debut of MTV's Laguna Beach. E4's One Tree Hill was similarly unimpressive with just 21,000 viewers and a 0.1% share.

Overall, ITV1 remained first with an average primetime share of 32.1% (last week: 29.3%) versus BBC One's 22.9% (23.9%). Channel 4 followed on 10.6% (11.3%), then Five on 5.6% (6.0%) and BBC Two on 5.4% (6.1%).

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Ratings data supplied by ViewingFigures.com