‘Great British Bake Off’ Ratings Prove People Do Still Watch TV Live

It's off to a seriously impressive start.
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll probably know that ‘The Great British Bake Off’ returned to our screens on Wednesday (24 August) night, and the series opener ratings are impressive to say the least.

In recent months, we’ve heard lots of talk about whether people actually watch TV live - Chris Evans, we’re looking at you - and ‘Bake Off’ just provided proof that this is definitely the case.

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The average amount of viewers for the hour-long episode was 10.4 million viewers, and the show peaked with a whopping 11.4 million watching, reports state.

This is a million more compared to the last series’ premiere and bodes well for the rest of the 2016 episodes.

The huge figures contradict claims recently made by former ‘Top Gear’ host Chris Evans, who cited “the way television is being consumed” as the reason for his show’s ailing numbers, tweeting: “Overnight figures have never been less relevant.”

We may only be one episode into the new batch of ‘Bake Off’, but there’s already been one controversy, thanks to Paul Hollywood, who decided to dunk a jaffa cake into a cup of tea. The cheek of it.