The Chart Show: BBC Two Comedy Zone (again)

The new Thursday night overnight rating figures are in! And you know what that means? That’s right - an incredibly easy update for us. Phew.

So, Life’s Too Short continues to struggle, though the rate at which it’s losing viewers is slowing. Maybe that million viewers realised it’d be the strongest episode of the series so far, with it managing to last an entire 28 minutes without Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant popping up on screen, and without there even being any famous Americans on screen. When we say ‘strongest’ it’s all relative, obvs – it still had woeful LOLRAPISTS and LOLPEADO jokes in there, but it wasn’t quite as bad as the previous episodes of the series. And hey, no dwarves in toilets this week, so that was a thing.

Meanwhile, Rev is getting more and more enjoyable – the latest episode was a delight, with Mick being treated to a homecooked meal by Rev Adam and Alex being a wonderful little scene (“Thank you… do I eat a potato next? Thank you… do I eat a vegetable next?”). Not only that, but Richard E Grant turning up, effectively playing Banker Withnail. That’s how you ‘do’ celebrity cameos. It certainly looks like the televiewers of Britain are in agreement with us on Rev, with it holding steady on 1.24 million viewers.

Slightly surprisingly, Frank Skinner’s Opinionated is now the most popular of the three shows, not least because we don’t think the BBC have promoted the series at all. It’s still a perfectly amiable programme, though hardly Skinner at his best. Even so, it’s interesting to see the series improve its viewership for the second week running, and even more interesting to note that dip in the ratings between the three shows – about a fifth of the audience for Rev switch over at 9.30pm, then switch back at 10pm to watch Frank Skinner. (Well, it could be an entirely different 240,000 people, admittedly. We haven’t conducted a poll.)

PREDICTION: The controller of BBC Two moves Life’s Too Short to 10pm at the last minute, to try and get a return on the big expensive programme it ended up paying half of. After all, the only reason it’s not popular is because it must be in the wrong timeslot.