7.3 million people watched the first final of The Great British Bake Off to air on Channel 4, overnight figures are showing. An extra 400-thousand people watched the final live on Channel 4+1.
The final had a peak audience of 8.3 million on Tuesday, just after the final three had completed their showstopper bakes.
This is the channel’s highest overnight figure since the Paralympics Opening Ceremony in 2012, and the series’ overnight average of 6.2 million is its highest since Big Fat Gypsy Weddings in 2011. Channel 4 have said that the series was the biggest for young audiences on any UK channel this year, having been watched by an average of 2 million people between the ages of 16 and 34.
The final’s viewing success comes in spite of Prue Leith, one of the series’ new judges, revealing the winner on Twitter ten hours early. Leith apologised after deleting the tweet, saying she was ‘mortified’ by her error, and that she was in ‘a different time zone’.
However, the figures are just over half of those received by the series when it had its home on BBC One. 14 million people watched the final of The Great British Bake Off last year to see Candice Brown crowned the winner in 2016, a figure which rose to 15.9 million after catch-up viewers were included.
Applications are already open for the next series of The Great British Bake Off, which will air next year. Watch the trailer for this year’s series below:
