TV Ratings Feb 8: Nine wins the night with Married At First Sight dinner party

Mediaweek editor James Manning looks at last night’s TV ratings

• Nine’s Married At First Sight dinner party ranks #1, Nine on top too
• TEN’s Gogglebox return drives up share, wins timeslot, demos
• Seven’s Front Bar special goes national with Mick, Sam & Andy

Seven

Another feast for soap fans after the news with four episodes of Home and Away. After hovering close to 700,000 all week, the Thursday night average across the two hours was 558,000.

The Front Bar: The Winter Edition was delivered by Mick, Sam and Andy in the first week of the last month of summer. The trio previewed the Winter Olympics which start this weekend in what was possibly their first episode networked around the country at the same time on the primary channel. Good to see the team didn’t try and raise the Bar too high – Mick dropped a fart joke and then a brown run gag in the first segment. The program just made the top 20 and up against Gogglebox the best it could do was 330,000. The Melbourne audience was close to double the number watching in Melbourne.

Surveillance Oz followed at 10pm on 223,000.

Nine

A Current Affair returned to five metro markets last night with 701,000 watching. The stories featured included a mum fighting for justice after the murder of her daughter and how shopping centres are spying on their customers.

On Married At First Sight the program’s second week ended on 938,000 at a dinner party where the 11 couples met each other for the first time. Thursday was again a good night with no MKR – last week the Thursday ep did 993,000.

The 2015 movie Hot Pursuit followed with 298,000.

TEN

The Project 7pm featured the great Maude Garrett speaking with Clint Eastwood and the real-life heroes portraying themselves in the new movie 15:17 To Paris. No sign of Lisa Wilkinson last night with the new panellist travelling overseas for a mystery interview for the Network Ten program. The Thursday episode started on 356,000 and then grew to 560,000.

Gogglebox then returned where shows being watched included My Kitchen Rules, Home and Away, Married and The Project. The first ep of the new season did 714,000, which helped lift the TEN share to over 18%, its best since the end of the Big Bash League.

ABC

At 6pm the new Think Tank dropped again with 122,000 after audiences earlier in the work were trending down from 203,000 to 170,000.

The final episode of Would I Lie To You? featured one of the greats from The Young OnesAde Edmondson – with 387,000 watching.

The final episode of season five of Call The Midwife followed with 326,000 before season six launches in this timeslot next week.

Good Karma Hospital then did 199,000 at 9.30pm.

SBS

Michael Portillo was in Scotland as his Great British Railway Journey travelled from Stirling to Invergowrie with 239,000 watching.

Launch day for the much-anticipated arrival of the food truck on Shane Delia’s Recipe For Life is getting close. The episode did 119,000.

Episode two of Running Wild With Bear Grylls was next where he was joined by Ben Stiller. The show did 113,000.

After a big launch double-episode crowd last week of 215,000, Knightfall returned with 124,000 which is a good number after poor lead-in performances.

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