Gavin and Stacey The Finale wins Christmas Day overnight ratings in 2024
The BBC’s cracking line-up dominated the ratings with ten out of ten of the most watched shows of the day.
Christmas Day on the BBC brought people together in their millions and saw Gavin and Stacey triumph. Ruth Jones and James Corden created a magical finale that fans will treasure forever. Their exquisitely written comedy creation is a show all about family, love and joy and it proved to be the unmissable TV event of the year.
— Charlotte Moore, BBC Chief Content Officer
The last ever episode of the hit British sitcom took the top spot and was watched by a staggering 12.3 million viewers, beating their last Christmas special five years ago and making it the biggest Christmas Day overnight since 2008.
The BBC’s cracking line-up dominated the ratings with ten out of ten of the most watched shows of the day, for the first time ever, capping off an amazing year for the BBC.
The most hotly anticipated programmes of the year triumphed as the Wallace and Gromit new feature length film Vengeance Most Fowl came in second with a huge 9.4 million.
The BBC took control of the TV set on the day - it was BBC One’s biggest share on Christmas Day since 2007. BBC One was bigger than all of SVOD combined on the TV screen, nearly double the size overall and also bigger for 16-34s. BBC One was three times the size of both Netflix & YouTube (individually), and over double the size of each for 16-34. The BBC as a whole made up over half of the viewing to the broadcaster market for 16-34s. BBC iPlayer on its own was bigger than Netflix, both overall and for 16-34s.
Charlotte Moore, BBC’s Chief Content Officer says: “Christmas Day on the BBC brought people together in their millions and saw Gavin and Stacey triumph. Ruth Jones and James Corden created a magical finale that fans will treasure forever. Their exquisitely written comedy creation is a show all about family, love and joy and it proved to be the unmissable TV event of the year. I’m very proud that the line-up across the day was a showcase for the very best in British storytelling, and caps off an exceptional 2024 for the BBC with increased market share against the competition both local and global.”
The BBC took its domination of the Christmas Day UK TV ratings into Boxing Day with Call the Midwife and Outnumbered topping the charts.
The Christmas specials of the long-running BBC shows both peaked with around 4M viewers, placing them first and second on the Boxing Day list.
ITV had a better Boxing Day than its Christmas. The 1% Club Christmas Special, which aired from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., was third with an average 3.2M audience and peak of 3.4M, while The Masked Singer: Christmas Special came second with 2.5M average. Four of the top 10 slots were taken by ITV shows compared with the prior day’s zero.
EDIT: Deadline reports Happy Valley’s Sarah Lancashire has also been made a CBE.
Other actors recognized include The Sixth Commandment star Anne Reid, who was awarded a CBE. There were Officer of the Order of the British Empire awards for Anne-Marie Duff (Bad Sisters), Eddie Marsan (Back to Black), and Kevin Whately (Inspector Morse).
Doctor Who star Thomas Baker was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire, while Desmond’s actress Carmen Munroe was made a Dame.
The BBC has acquired 10-part nature series The Americas, produced by the broadcaster’s Natural History Unit in association with Universal Television Alternative Studio.
Narrated by Tom Hanks, The Americas will air in Australia on Seven and 7plus sometime in 2025.
With +7 day viewing added, Gavin and Stacey’s finale reached an astonishing 19.1 million total viewers.
Wallace and Gromit wasn’t that far behind on 16.3 million.
“The BBC give us the greenlight and now we go, ‘How are we going to fund it?’, because a greenlight is 30% of the budget, which is traditionally now what a [Public Service Broadcaster] can only afford to put in,” she said. “Each case is different but it leaves us with gap of say 60% of the budget. We are now [in the UK] getting closer to that indie film model at the lower cost end.”
Featherstone said the BBC and other Public Service Broadcasters like Channel 4 are having to “funnel more money” into higher-cost content, which doesn’t necessarily reflect British values. “The market itself won’t take care of British content and that is the bit we need to look at, that is the bit at risk,” she said.
She noted it is becoming harder to sell British content abroad, pointing to the example of ITV hit Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which “didn’t sell to many countries at all.”
A Google search found this article from The Independent in April 2024, which basically said that ITV lost more than £1 million on Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
Even though the show has been bought by 12 foreign broadcasters, (Kevin Lygo, the managing director of media and entertainment of ITV) has revealed it wasn’t enough to break even since the show didn’t appeal enough to foreign viewers.
Only Charlotte is really delivering on content but has a BBC budget behind her. Kevin Lygo just about gets a pass but Ian Katz has been a disaster for C4. Not a fan of Ben Frow personally but he’s ran C5 like clockwork and unlike other stations added scripted content to the schedule that people watch.
I feel like ITV would have known that a show about a scandal at the British Post Office wasn’t exactly going to do great business with international sales.
Really time for Channel 4 to get someone new in I think, after all it’s the channel’s remit to be dynamic and ever-evolving. The Katz era has been pretty broadly disastrous with not that much new hits but very notable flops (Rise and Fall and Generation Z come to mind) and of course the channel’s financial crisis and mass axings. As a result the channel’s schedule these days seems like it is just another More4 but with the news tacked on.
Perhaps the biggest success in his tenure was demoting MAFS from a middling weekly show on the main channel to a huge hit nightly on E4, although one would think the main channel would benefit from the show with its current success, which I say as someone who cannot stand the show.
If there is one thing Channel 4 primetime lacks (Fridays aside) it is stability, and bringing MAFS back over would help create a nightly fixture at least for a portion of the year, it is something they desperately need without a major soap to keep ratings steady and have lacked ever since Big Brother went.
Channel 5 is not to my tastes at the moment but do commend Frow for turning the channel’s fortunes around and bringing in more original drama. I do fail to see why they still show Friends however, it seems very off target for their predominantly 50+ skewed lineup.
Pretty sure Friends original viewers would be bang in the middle of that demo now. Memories of their youth before watching a three hour countdown show of the best Air Fryers and a special on Lidl
