The Voice v Britain’s Got Talent: the gloves are off

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Posted by Gerry Kiernan

Online content editor

April 30th 2012 at 13:56

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Entertainment

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The Voice loses ratings battle

The Voice began its live shows this weekend but guess who won the Saturday night ratings battle?…

This weekend was a huge one for The Voice UK as it went to live shows on Saturday and Sunday. The BBC was hoping The Voice’s Saturday night lead over Britain’s Got Talent in the ratings battle would continue.

Britain’s Got Talent on top

Yet, for this week at least, Simon Cowell is back at the top where he thinks he belongs.

According to overnight figures, BGT drew an average of 10.1m viewers compared to The Voice’s 9.3m (including those watching in HD). However both shows had exactly the same audience share, meaning that a total of 41.8% of people watching TV at the time were tuned in to the programmes.

The BBC and ITV have been at loggerheads since the talent shows started. Last week ITV accused the BBC of deliberately over-running The Voice’s Saturday night slot by three minutes to swipe millions off BGT’s audience. This follows on from ITV moving BGT’s broadcast by half an hour so that the two shows no longer overlapped by 20 minutes.

Results spoiler

The Voice notched up a respectable 8.6m viewers for its live results show on Sunday evening when Sam Buttery (Tom Jones’s contestant) and Sophie Griffin (Will.i.am’s contestant) were voted off the competition in the show’s first public vote.

Catch Up

And let’s not forget that many people will watch The Voice on Catch Up. The BBC announced last week that The Voice had broken the iPlayer record with 764,000 people requesting it.

What did you think of The Voice’s first live shows? Would you rather watch BGT? Let us know below

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