Insight

In Part 2 of our What People Watch looking at shared viewing events, there was only one area to focus on: televisual coverage of the Platinum Jubilee, which marked 70 years on the throne for Her Majesty the Queen.

This remarkable length of time to stay in a job was marked by numerous events with extensive television coverage to match. As the national broadcaster, the BBC was to the fore with Saturday evening’s Concert at the Palace attracting an audience of 11.2m, peaking at 13.4m when Prince Charles delivered his message. This was the highest television audience for any programme so far this year. The rest of top ten Jubilee programmes from across the weekend (table 1) were also dominated by the BBC.

Table 1: Top 10 Jubilee programmes
Source: Barb. Live and VOSDAL TV-set viewing June 2nd – 5th 2022

Recently, we have discussed how the viewers-per-view factor is a good indicator that a programme is one that viewers want to enjoy together. This holds particularly true for coverage of the Jubilee. The average viewers-per-view factor across all programmes for the preceding four weeks was 1.36*, meaning eight of the top ten Jubilee programmes brought people together to watch more than average.

Commentators across the weekend’s coverage were keen to highlight how the Jubilee was a uniting event, and in pure numbers terms it’s hard to disagree. The most-watched TV programme of the year so far took a 67% share of audience at that time – which begs the question: what were the other 33% were watching? By isolating non-viewers of the concert and restricting our analysis to the time that the concert was broadcast (19:30 – 22:30), we can see the top 20 other programmes that people were watching during the concert (table 2).

Table 2: Top 20 programmes viewed by those not watching Concert at the Palace
Source: Barb. As viewed audience 19:30-22:30 04/06/22. 4-screen audience to broadcast programmes. TV set only for SVOD programmes.

With the audience following their disparate interests, the top 20 is comprised of programmes from 15 different channels and services. There is also a mixture of live and catch-up or on-demand viewing. Mr Holmes was broadcast on BBC 2 while the concert was broadcast on BBC 1. Clearly Stranger Things and The Boys, from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video respectively, were viewed on-demand and were the only two programmes from the SVOD services to make it into this table.

We can also see a mixture of current and archive programmes. Series 22 of Midsomer Murders was released in April 2021, but it is viewing to episode 1 of series 6, which first aired in 2003, and was broadcast at 9pm during the concert, which features here. On the other hand, viewers were catching up on two episodes of Eastenders that had been broadcast just a few days earlier.

This is the beauty of limitless choice at work. During the Golden Jubilee, alternatives to viewing the Party at the Palace that year (June 3rd 2002 – 12.5m, BBC1) would have been provided by a mere 148 BARB-monitored broadcast channels and whatever you happened to have on tape, DVD or your recently launched Sky+ box. Now we are able to report audiences to more than 2,300 different shows from almost 273 measured broadcast channels as well as BVOD and SVOD services.

For the last word on the Jubilee, we’ll take a look at how likely it was that people in different regions across the UK were to watch at least part of the most-viewed programme from the weekend, the Concert at the Palace, compared to the UK average (map 1).

Map 1 – Regional reach for Concert at the Palace. Indexed vs UK average
Source: Barb. Regional reach for Concert at the Palace (04/06/22) by region indexed against UK average reach.

The map shows that people in the East, South East, South West and Border regions were at least 10% more likely to have viewed than the UK average, while those in London, North East, North West and Northern Ireland were at least 10% less likely to have viewed. Even in the area with lowest reach, that figure was still 26% meaning more than one in four of those watching television were tuned in.

People in the South West appeared to be the most patriotic with 44% tuned in at some point during the concert, an index of 140. However, this might be one time that we have to concede that TV was not the most important social glue. With the concert itself taking place in the capital and street parties held across the country, it might be that these lower-indexing areas were the most committed to celebrating in real life. Whether in real life, or watching on television, the Jubilee certainly seemed to be an event that brought people together.

Doug Whelpdale, Head of Insight at Barb

* Broadcast programmes with a minimum TV-set audience of 250k. Excluding news and weather broadcasts.