CSI back with 3.9m

Five's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation made a cracking start to its ninth run with 3.9m viewers (16.4% share) at 9pm yesterday, the channel's highest audience since 16 June 2006.

The hour-long episode of the long-running US crime drama series peaked at 4m (16.8%) at 9.30pm. The show was a sizeable 70% over the channel's slot average for last year of 2.3m (9.8%).

The last time the UK's youngest terrestrial channel got a higher audience was on 16 June 2006 when an episode from the same show pulled in 3.9m (17%) in its usual 9pm slot. The highest rated edition of the show last year averaged 3.8m (16.3%) on 12 February.

The episode last night also made reasonable headway in the commercially sensitive upmarket and youth audiences. Of those watching the programme 33.2% were from the ABC1 demographic, while 21.1% were aged between 16 and 34.

Five found itself in the rare position of outperforming all other channels except BBC1.

Channel 4's latest events from Celebrity Big Brother, also at 9pm, had 3m (12.6%) over the hour, with 267,000 watching on C4+1 an hour later. Channel 4 pushed ITV1 into fourth place as Extreme Slimmers could only interest 2.4m (10.3%) in the same slot. The show was down by two million on the slot average.

Source: BroadcastNow