Ant & Dec's 'Takeaway' drops to 5.8m

Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway lost another 600,000 viewers last night, a fall of 1.5m since the entertainment show returned a fortnight ago.

This week's programme, which pulled in 5.81m (25.4%) from 7.45pm, once again suffered from going up against BBC One reality series Let's Dance For Comic Relief.

The show, which sees celebrities performing dance routines to popular songs, grew from its debut audience of 6.81m (31.1%) last week to 7.15m (31.9%) between 7.25pm and 8.40pm.

After Dance, the National Lottery draw was seen by 6.36m (27.4%) and Casualty pulled in 6.33m (28.6%).

ITV1's Chris Tarrant gameshow The Colour Of Money posted an increase of around half a million viewers on its underwhelming debut last week. This week's show was seen by 4.29m (20.4%) over an hour from 6.45pm.

It was preceded by Harry Hill's TV Burp, which had 5.08m (25.6%). The audience for ITV1's early evening primetime lineup was dented by live Six Nations coverage of England vs Ireland on BBC One, with 5.93m (31.6%) between 5.15pm and 7.25pm.

BBC Two's documentary Timewatch: QE2 - The Final Voyage interested 1.95m (8.5%) in the 8pm hour, while Channel 4's Grand Designs rerun had 1.23m (5.3%) and Five's Minder repeat picked up just 477k (2.1%).

QI XL improved BBC Two's audience to 2.02m (9.2%) at 9pm, and on Channel 4, a screening of The Shawshank Redemption appealed to 1.75m (9.6%). Five's NCIS brought in 1.24m (5.5%), then a new episode of CSI: New York drew 2.25m (11.3%).

BBC One averaged a share of 27.3% during primetime, comfortably ahead of ITV1's 18.8%. Channel 4 was third with 7.6% (+1: 0.6%), followed by BBC Two with 6.8% and Five with 5.7%.

Ratings data supplied by Attentional