'Mrs Brown' tops the charts for Christmas TV ratings

MRS BROWN'S Boys, the programme the critics love to hate, was the top-rated show on Irish television over the Christmas and new year period.

The comedy series’s first Christmas special on RTÉ One attracted nearly half the available audience on Christmas night, with an average audience of 880,000 viewers.

The public's appetite for working-class Dublin humour was also reflected in TV3's top-rated home-grown television programme. The Brendan Grace Livecomedy special on Christmas Eve night attracted an average of 443,500 viewers and was second after the episode of Coronation Streetbroadcast on St Stephen's Day in the TV3 ratings.

The second most-watched programme on Irish television over the same period was RTÉ’s New Year’s Eve special hosted by Miriam O’Callaghan, which attracted an average audience of 689,000, peaking at 924,000 at midnight.

The 50-year celebration of The Dubliners, For One Night Only – the Dubliners,hosted by Gay Byrne attracted 527,000 viewers on Christmas night.

The Christmas night RTÉ Nine O'Clock News, the last read by retiring newsreader Anne Doyle, was watched by an average of 387,000 viewers. However, the RTÉ Six-One Newsbroadcast on Christmas Eve had an average of 480,000 viewers.

TG4 also expressed satisfaction at its holiday ratings, stating that more than 2.7 million viewers tuned into the station during the holiday season.

The channel said it had a “highly creditable” 3.2 per cent audience share between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day with high viewership figures for its Munster v Connacht rugby match and documentaries about actor Ray McAnally, The Chieftains and Michael D Higgins’s successful presidential bid.

Nielsen’s end-of-year audience share figures show a slight increase in TV3 audience share with a drop in RTÉ’s.

TV3 and 3e’s audience share went up from 14.09 per cent in 2010 to 14.47 per cent last year – an overall increase of 2.7 per cent

The biggest faller was RTÉ Two where the audience share fell from 9.7 per cent in 2010 to 8.47 per cent last year, a fall of 12.7 per cent. RTÉ One, which has a 25 per cent share and retains its status as by far the most popular channel, stays almost the same.