NEW SEASON OF “BRITAIN’S GOT TALENT” KICKS OFF WITH A BANG

One year after Britain’s Got Talent made its season debut with 10.3 million viewers tuning in to see the astonishing performance of Scotch singer Susan Boyle, the ITV show’s fourth season kicked off Saturday with a record 10.6 million viewers, representing 44 percent of the country’s entire TV audience. It peaked with 12.2 million, a 49-percent share. Twelve-year old drummer Kieran Gaffney drew the most attention. By Sunday afternoon, his minute-long performance on BGT had been viewed by more than two million people on YouTube. The talent contest attracted about 300,000 more viewers than last week’s first-ever televised debate featuring the leaders of Britain’s Labor, Conservative, and Liberal parties. In an interview with today’s (Monday) London Sun, Piers Morgan, one of the show’s three judges, quipped, “I am very pleased to discover that Simon [Cowell], Amanda [Holden] and I are still marginally more popular than Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Losing a ratings war to them would have been a disaster.” Indeed, ITV did experience something of a ratings disaster immediately after BGT, as 70 percent of the audience bailed out, leaving only 3.2 million people to watch the show that followed, The Prisoner, starring Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel.