JFK conspiracy piques viewer interest for ABC

TELEVISION viewing jumped as a cold night in parts of Australia kept many viewers inside.

TELEVISION viewing jumped as a cold night in parts of Australia kept many viewers inside.

And the ABC's questionable screening within Four Corners of a US documentary re-tracing the bullets used in John F Kennedy's assassination did exactly as might have been expected. Its audience of 923,000 was Four Corners' biggest metro audience for the year.

A number of programs recorded their best metro audiences for weeks, if not months, with the top-ranking show, The Big Bang Theory, recording its best Monday night audience for the year. Its average audience of 1.289 million viewers recalled the US sitcoms halcyon days of 2011 and 2012 when it regularly attracted in excess of one million viewers.

A repeat episode also registered 959,000 viewers for Nine although it wasn't screened in Melbourne.

The pairing wasn't enough to give the channel a nightly win though. Seven won in all people with a 21.4 per cent channel share ahead of Nine's 20.0 per cent, ABC1's 17.3 per cent and Ten's 9.3 per cent.

It was ABC1's best Monday night channel share for the year and was anchored by more than one million metro viewers for Australian Story (1.018 million). That was the program's second biggest audience for the year. Media Watch also rose with the tide, adding 166,000 on last week for 788,000, its best audience since July.

Nine News won at 6pm with a capital city audience of 1.25 million, including more than 400,000 in both Sydney and Melbourne. Seven News had 1.237m and Today Tonight 1.06m as it continues to beat A Current Affair (954,000) in metro markets.

Network Ten's breakfast experiment continues to founder in its early days. An eventful Wake Up in which Ita Buttrose was stranded in a broken-down water taxi and a viewer was given the chance to win $1 million on a windswept Manly beach only averaged 28,000 viewers (including 2,3000 in Sydney) against Sunrise's 379,000 and Today's 335,000. Studio 10 also fell on last week to 32,000 metro viewers.

Preliminary OzTAM ratings, Monday 11 November

1 THE BIG BANG THEORY Nine 1,289,000

2 NINE NEWS Nine 1,250,000

3 SEVEN NEWS Seven 1,237,000

4 TODAY TONIGHT Seven 1,060,000

5 THE BLACKLIST Seven 1,032,000

6 AUSTRALIAN STORY ABC1 1,018,000

7 HIGHWAY PATROL Seven 1,000,000

8 HOME AND AWAY Seven 993,000

9 THE BIG BANG THEORY -RPT EP2 Nine 959,000

10 A CURRENT AFFAIR Nine 954,000

11 ABC NEWS ABC1 944,000

12 FOUR CORNERS ABC1 923,000

13 7.30 ABC1 899,000

14 AIR RESCUE Seven 858,000

15 THE BIG BANG THEORY -RPT Nine 852,000