After a year in the wilderness, Ten's Australian Idol has bounced back to nearly 2 million viewers.



Written-off as past it's used-by-date after an audience drop of nearly 40% in 2005, this week's Disco night averaged 1.9 viewers - almost a return to it's glory days.

Idol benefited from an unusually high-rating early evening on Ten, with the Bathurst 1000 kicking off the night with very strong numbers.

Infact the Ten Network's coverage of the Bathurst 1000 ended yesterday with the second highest TV audience in history.

More than 2.2 million people watched the Bathurst 1000 on the Ten Network in the major metro areas and in regional Australia yesterday.

It was a day long tribute to the late Peter Brock and that was probably as much the reason for the higher audience as was the closeness of the finish: half a second.

But when final figuring is done by Ten and Oztam, the audience will be much higher than the early figures say.

Preliminary figures from Oztam, Ten and the regional ratings service shows that 1.408 million people watched the race. Ten said that was up 11.5 per cent on 2005's 1.29 million.

But because of delays in the race from crashes and safety cars, the actual coverage and presentation didn't finish until well after 5.30 pm, more than half an hour late.

The early (and unadjusted ratings figures) show that in the capital cities Ten News At Five averaged 1.769 million people.

It didn't, Ten News didn't go to air until around 5.40 pm and was cut short to allow The Simpsons to start for the network at 6 pm.

Sports Tonight didn't run at 5.30 pm and the early ratings had it being watched with an audience of 1.30 million.

It didn't, it was pre-empted. That was actually the audience for the last bit of the race (credits and goodbyes) and Ten News.

In regional areas Ten News At Five out-rated the race coverage by a considerable margin; more than 984,000 were down as watching the news from 5 pm.

They were watching the last part of the coverage, including the presentation and Craig Lowndes' emotional reaction to winning the inaugural Peter Brock Trophy.

The race coverage was shown as averaging almost 756,500 people in regional areas. It was more than that. Sports Tonight was shown as averaging 701,000: it wasn't on in the bush either.

The upshot is that when the figures are adjusted, the metro audience for the race will exceed the 1.408 million figure and rise close to if not exceed 1.5 million: in regional areas it will rise well above 800,000.
That means the total audience will exceed 2.3 million nationally.

The audience peaked at 2.2 million viewers up 20 per cent on last year.