It may be down from previous years but MasterChef ended with a season high of over two million viewers, while Australia's Got Talent only managed a third of last year's audience.
The winner announcement portion of Ten's MasterChef commanded 2.19 million metro viewers with a peak of 2.56 million, according to overnight figures from OzTam. The finale night part of the cooking competition, which saw Newcastle electrician Andy Allen triumph, averaged 1.88 million viewers. Nationally, the show averaged 2.9 million people with a peak of 3.45 million.
MasterChef boosted Ten's overall ratings fortunes against its rival networks yesterday and brought Ten its highest audience share (27.9%) of the survey year-to-date.
Despite the good figures last night, the finale for the fourth series is down from previous years. Last year, MasterChef attracted 2.6 million viewers while the show enjoyed atmospheric ratings in 2009 and 2010 of 3.7 and 3.9 million people respectively.
This year has been more quiet for the show overall with its weekday and Sunday figures down from previous seasons, particularly when it was up against The Block on Nine.
MasterChef resoundingly stole the thunder from Seven whose under-performing reality competition series Australia's Got Talent also ended its run last night with its finale. The show couldn't crack the million ceiling and had 998,000 viewers tuned in, significantly down from last year's 2.8 million viewers. AGT had been struggling all season compared to last year. It debuted to 1.19 million in April and couldn't compete with The Voice on Nine.
Elsewhere, the return of the Gruen crew on the ABC with its Olympics-themed show Gruen Sweat saw 931,000 people tune in.
On Nine, The Voice US was 24th in the rankings with 387,000 viewers.
Other programs in the top 20 on Wednesday were Seven News, Nine News, Today Tonight (Seven), A Current Affair (Nine), ABC News, Mrs. Brown's Boys (Seven), Home and Away (Seven), The Project (Ten), Ten News, Hot Seat (Nine), Deal or No Deal (Seven), 7.30 (ABC), QI (ABC), House (Ten), Randling (Ten) and The Bold and the Beautiful (Ten).
Across the main channels, Ten convincingly won the night with 27.9% of audience share, followed by Seven with 20.6% and the ABC with 12.0%. Nine was fourth for the third consecutive night with 11.9% and SBS had 3.8%.
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