HD Ratings: Baby Steps for Grand Designs

Despite rampant publicity about its NZ home-building link, Three’s season premiere of Grand Designs UK didn’t rate through the roof on Tuesday.

But despite losing to the reality shows on both TVNZ channels, it improved significantly on the previous week’s American Idol.

Designs averaged 3.5% of Three’s target audience, 25-54 year-olds, compared to 2.2% for Idol’s first hour, and 2.9% of 18-49s (vs Idol’s 1.6%).

And among household shoppers with kids Designs nearly doubled Idol’s viewership: 4.0% vs 2.3%. Only in the 18-39 demo was Idol marginally more popular.

So, on their own, Designs‘ ratings were modest to say the least but they will be a relief to Three programmers following Idol’s failure to fire.

However, new stablemate NCIS couldn’t capitalise on Designs’ lead-in to make gains on Idol and, in fact, rated lower in all the core commercial demos, averaging only 1.0% – 2.2%.

It was most popular with 25-54s and, because of its abrupt pre-empting of Idol, can be expected to rate better as more fans discover it’s back on.

NCIS lead-out SVU was down on the previous week, averaging only 1.2% of 25-54s vs 2.8%. Whereas Idol’s second hour built in popularity, NCIS’ viewership was steady and couldn’t deliver SVU as big a lead-in.

So There’s new strategy had mixed results, boosting 7.30-8.30 viewership but costing it viewers from 8.30-10.30.

TVNZ 1 and 2 seesawed for much of the evening, with My Kitchen Rules dominating the 18-39 and HHS/k demos but proving vulnerable to Dog Squad and The Force among 25-54s and 18-49s.

And TVNZ 1’s Rich House, Poor House easily out-rated TVNZ 2’s The Resident and Three’s NCIS, averaging 4.2% of 25-54s and 3.8% of 18-49s, ahead of lead-out 20/20 winning its slot in all the key demos except HHS/k (who opted for Grey’s Anatomy).

As a result, TVNZ 1 scored the biggest shares of 25-54 (29.4%) and 18-49 (27.5%) for the night while TVNZ 2 had a big lead with 18-39s (29.0%) and HHS/k (36.0%); Three’s highest share was 16.6% of 25-54s.