BBC Three’s comedy series returned for its second season last night and drew an overnight audience of 832K viewers and a 4.6% share. Those figures are up slightly on the 830K viewers and the 4.3% share that the season 1 premiere drew last year. That strong overnight figures come in addition to the series’ strong performance on BBC iPlayer, where the premiere episode, which was available for a week ahead of its TV debut as part of BBC Three’s new digital initiative, drew a total of 1.5 million iPlayer requests.
Created by Jack Whitehall, Bad Education follows Alfie Wickers, Abbey Grove high school’s self-styled maverick teacher-in-residence. In reality though, as Alfie is straight out of teacher training and into his first job, he shares more traits with the kids he teaches than the other teachers; he is in fact a bigger kid than most of the kids in his class. Alfie relies on his misguided sense of cunning and his poorly developed ability to lie and cheat to hold down his job. But, it all comes from a good place because Alfie really cares about his class of dunces who have been written off by the rest of the staff. The comedy series is produced by Tiger Aspect Productions and features a large cast which includes Jack Whitehall, Mathew Horne, Michelle Gomez and Sarah Solemani.
“Jack Whitehall’s Bad Education is back on BBC Three with a bang, with 832k viewers last night and 1.5m requests on iPlayer over the last seven days. What a fantastic start to our new BBC Three innovation of premiering all scripted comedies on BBC iPlayer”, said BBC Three Controller Zai Bennett. “I couldn’t be more thrilled with the reception Bad Education (series 2)’s first episode has received. Giving our viewers more choice in the way they enjoy programmes is a really important initiative on BBC Three and this outstanding result is testament to the quality of Jack’s show and how much the audience appreciate it.”
While Victoria Jaye, Head of BBC TV Content, Online and IPTV, added: “We couldn’t be more delighted with how fans have responded to us premiering BBC Three’s comedy, Bad Education (series 2) on BBC iPlayer – with 1.5 million requests for the first episode in the seven day premiere window. This significant demand on BBC iPlayer and a strong overnight TV audience of 832k on BBC Three demonstrates how BBC iPlayer is a complementary platform to our broadcast channels, enabling us to schedule programmes in new ways that our audience truly values.”
