The Voice outsings Britain's Got Talent

‘The Voice’ attracted an average audience of 10.68 million viewers, a massive 45.5% share of the TV-watching public, between 7pm and 8.20pm on BBC One and BBC One HD on Saturday night.

The programme is gaining momentum, having attracted an audience of 9.54 million last week and 8.43 million on its launch on 26 March.

A new take on the talent-show format, ‘The Voice’ judges Tom Jones, Jessie J, Will.i.am and Danny O'Donoghue decide whether to take the contestants through to the next round without seeing what they look like.

By comparison, the fourth episode of ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ attracted an average audience of 9.63 million viewers, a 38.0% share, on ITV1 and ITV1 HD between 8pm and 9.15pm. An additional 520,300 watched the show on ITV1 +1.

‘Britain’s Got Talent’ is sponsored by Virgin Media and, after being absent for the audition shows in 2011, Cowell returned from the beginning of this series. The other judges are Amanda Holden, David Walliams and Alesha Dixon.

Although beaten by ‘The Voice’, the average audience for ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ was higher than last week (7 April) when the ITV1 show had an average audience of 9.1 million, the lowest of this series so far.

There was some consolation for ITV as ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ had a peak audience of 12.22 million viewers at 8.40pm, while ‘The Voice’ trailed a little behind with a peak audience of 12.08 million viewers (at 8.10pm).

During the 20 minutes when ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ and ‘The Voice’ went head-to-head, the BBC One show held on to its audience with an average of 11.78 million viewers, while ITV could only manage half that (5.79 million viewers).

ITV announced last week that it was planning to move ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ to a later start time to avoid the clash with ‘The Voice’. The show will start at 8.30pm from this weekend (21 April).

Earlier in the day, the BBC’s final coverage of The Grand National horse race before it moves to Channel 4, managed an average audience of 4.1 million viewers, a 33.9% share, between 1pm and 5.15pm across BBC One and BBC One HD.

‘Titanic’, ITV’s high-profile drama from the writer of ‘Downton Abbey’, bowed out with an average audience of 3.52 million viewers between 9pm and 10pm on ITV1 and ITV1 HD last night, a 14.0% share. An additional 224,700 watched the drama on ITV1 +1.

Although significantly behind its launch audience of 6.89 million viewers across ITV1 and ITV1 HD, last night’s ‘Titanic’ did beat the four-part drama’s lowest audience the previous week (3.16 million).

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