Over 6m see Sir David end 'Cold Blood'

More than 6m viewers saw Sir David Attenborough's last major television series appearance with the end of Life in Cold Blood on Monday.

The show attracted 6.1m viewers, or a 25.9% share, from 9pm - its best turnout since 6.7m (28%) for the opening episode. Sir David has said he will from now on make one-off documentaries instead of his trademark natural history series.

Across the series Life in Cold Blood notched up a respectable average of 5.9m (24.8%) which is 400,000 more than the slot's average for last year.

Its strength has not helped ITV1's The Palace which also came to a close on Monday, in the same slot, with 3.3m (14%) viewers. The average audience for the beleaguered series was just 3.3m (14%) - well short of the channel's 5.7m (24.4%) slot performance in 2007.

Channel 4 put in a decent performance at 9pm with Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe. It reached 1.9m (7.8%) which was 200,000 more than the slot average.

Five's first outing of Breaking into Tesco beat the channel's usual performance in the slot by 200,000 with 1.4m (5.9%) viewers at 9pm while, on BBC Two, 1.6m (6.6%) watched Lady Windermere's Fan from 8.30pm.