Dibley biggest comedy in 2007

The Vicar of Dibley's New Year's Special, shown on the 1st January 2007, attracted the biggest ratings of any BBC show this year, and had 5.1 million more viewers than the next most popular comedy.

According to a study of major TV channels, the special attracted 13.08 million viewers, or 45.4% of the audience share. In fact it was the TV programme with the third biggest share of the audience this year, only beaten by the Rugby World Cup final (51.6%) and an episode of Coronation Street shown on the 15th January (49.5%).

According to BARB, the top ten rated comedies of 2007 are as follows:

It should however be noted that the 2007 Christmas specials - which include the new To the Manor Born episode have not yet been broadcast.

Whilst some of these ratings may seem encouraging for TV executives, it has in fact been a very bad year for all five of the terrestrial channels, all saw a fall in viewing figures.

The channel that came out worse was Channel 4, whose audience share dropped by 11% this year. If the Welsh channel S4C is included, the percentage share of the audience fell from 9.8% in 2006 to 8.7% in 2007. However, if 4+1 is included, the figure does raise to 8.8%. The fall in viewing figures has been attributed to a fall in people watching shows such as Big Brother.

The second worst channel was Five, who lost 8.8% of its audience. Its audience share of 5.7% in 2006 fell to 5.5% this year. Next came BBC One, which lost 3.5% of its audience (22.8% in 2006, 22.0% in 2007), then BBC Two, down 3.4% (8.8% in 2006, 8.5% in 2007).

ITV1 faired the best out of the five terrestrial channels, although it still experienced a drop in audience share by 1.5% (19.6% in 2006, 19.3% in 2007). The channel however did see a rise in daytime viewing by getting rid of children's programmes on weekdays and replacing it with repeats of detective dramas such as Inspector Morse. ITV1 has a bigger peak time share of the audience than BBC One (7:30-10:00pm), however the BBC did manage to close the gap between them to 2.1%, compared to 2.9% last year.