Insight

Can you remember what you were doing last Saturday night? How about on Saturday nights 20 years ago? Well, there is a decent chance you were watching television on at least a few of those evenings.

Over the last 20 years, as many as 25 million of us have been watching something on TV on a Saturday evening. The Saturday night slot has a rich history, from The Generation Game (BBC: 1971 – 2007), to Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Take Away (ITV: 2002 – present), as well as the plethora of reality and talent shows that have graced our screens since the turn of the millennium.

With TV’s Geordie royalty celebrating 20 years since Saturday Night Takeaway first aired, we are going to take an in-depth look at Saturday evening viewing habits in this edition of What People Watch.

Across 18 seasons, Saturday Night Takeaway episodes (excluding specials) have averaged an audience of 7.5m. Only once has the show breached the 10 million mark – on March 21st 2020. This was the last fully-live show before lockdown restrictions forced a change in format to include recorded segments.

What this programme and other Saturday night shows have in common is that they are often a shared viewing experience. As Barb is a people-based measurement of viewing, our data help to understand the people taking part in this shared viewing. The Barb panel allows us to understand not only what content is on the screen and how it got to that screen, but crucially how many humans are on the other side of that screen and what they look like.

In its simplest form, this allows us to find out the average viewers-per-view figure for any given programme. In 2021, the Saturday night programme with an audience greater than 250k with the highest viewers-per view factor was The Italian Job (1969), which aired on ITV4 on Christmas Day and had an average of 2.45 viewers per view. Clearly, there weren’t 2.45 people in each home watching the film – some viewing was solo – but 38% of the audience were watching in the presence of at least three other people.

Table 1: Viewers per view – Saturday evening programming 2021

In table 1 it is easy to see the importance of shared viewing on Christmas Day in particular. Each programme has a viewers-per-view factor well in excess of the average 1.45 for Saturday evening broadcast programming.

If we look at Saturdays in 2022 (table 2), we see entertainment programming come to the fore. Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and Limitless Win both feature, alongside Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel.

Table 2: Viewers per view – Saturday Evening programming 2022
(January 1st 2022 – March 5th 2022)

Further consideration of how much co-viewing there is to each programme illustrates the degree to which these programmes are often viewed in the company of others. Both Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel have audiences where more than two-thirds of viewers are watching in the company of someone else.

As a point of comparison, we can look at people who viewed Rick Stein’s Cornwall on BBC2. In this instance we see 72% of the audience were viewing on their own. As we can see below, only 3% of the audience for this programme viewed with at least two others, while the same figure for Saturday Night Takeaway was 23% and 17% for The Wheel.

We can look in even greater detail at co-viewing audiences. For example, we can say that 17% of the audience to this episode of Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway were co-viewing with children. That figure is smaller for The Wheel, at 9%, suggesting that Ant and Dec are more successful at attracting the family audience. Channel 4’s highly entertaining, but more adult-oriented, Taskmaster (01/01/22) took just 4% of its audience from those viewing with children.

Co-viewing is one of the ways that Barb data can help us understand who is behind the glass when we talk about audience numbers. We can show that Saturday night programming is often watched in the company of others, and build a rich understanding of audiences as people beyond simple ratings. Now I just need to try and remember what I was doing last Saturday!

Doug Whelpdale, Head of Insight at Barb