20 Years of CBeebies: A Hardcore Statfest

Following on from yesterday’s browse through the twenty most popular programmes in the history of the BBC’s channel for younger children, here’s some more information about those shows, in worrying levels of detail.

Firstly, a quick note: all the data is based on programmes marking the BARB Weekly Top 10 of most-watched programmes on the channel. And, handily, because the public BARB data includes both day of the week and time of day for each qualifying broadcast, we can get a bit more detail on things. So…

NOTE: Apologies for anyone trying to view this on a mobile. I can assure you all those numbers are very interesting, and you’re bloody-minded enough to persevere, you can see them slightly better if you’re in landscape view.

Which is the most popular day of the week for CBeebies shows?

As might be expected, weekdays — when kids are either getting ready for, or just back from school — are more popular than weekends, where they’re off doing other stuff instead, and where the channel often puts on signed repeats or slightly older programming. So, here’s a breakdown of days of the week of shows making a weekly top ten. Including a breakdown by year of broadcast, because I love you:

Quite the difference between weekdays and weekends, there. It’s perhaps notable that the difference between weekdays and weekends is much less obvious for 2020 and 2021, when family weekends saw far fewer options for Switching Off The Television Set and Going and Doing Something Less Boring Instead.

Which is the most popular month for CBeebies shows?

All logic here would suggest it’s the colder winter months that see a larger audience. And you’d be correct. Obviously here, count of programmes in the top 10 each week isn’t going to reveal anything — it’s going to be ten per week, no matter what. So instead, here’s a table broken down by average viewing figure of a Top Ten programme for each given month.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the Christmas holiday and reliable ratings smash the annual CBeebies Christmas Panto being aired, December is the winner here.

Which is the most popular hour of the day for CBeebies shows?

Again, perhaps little surprise here. The teatime 5–6pm slot, where shows like Topsy and Tim, Gigglebiz and Grandpa In My Pocket could be found, just before the Bedtime Hour where programming caters more for pre-schoolers, are the norm, and slightly older kids flip to Channel 4 to watch The Simpsons.

Or at least, that was the case, until 2018, where programmes from 7–8am became increasingly popular. A quick peek at the programmes broadcast in that slot gives a clue as to why:

The channel’s most popular programme, and also Bing, blagging some huge million-plus viewing figures. But why is that? Well, a big factor here will be the way BARB collate the viewing figures. Since September 2018, ‘Four Screen’ viewing has been collated, including programmes watched on iPlayer. And, as the practice of accessing iPlayer has become easier (strange now to think that watching iPlayer on a TV set only came in a few years after the service launched), the change is very noticeable.

Here’s a set of figures from before BARB’s ratings change, where (to the best of my knowledge) only ‘recorded to PVR’ viewings of a show are factored into that ’28 day data’ figure. Very little difference between the two sets of figures.

Following the change to the way data is captured in 2018, there’s a much more notable difference between viewing windows. Here are figures for a comparable period in 2019 — figures already notably higher for the seven-day period as it is, are much higher for that 28-day period, nearly doubling the figures from 2017. For the record, iPlayer’s change from a 7-day catch-up window to a 28-day window came about in 2014, so it’s in place for both sets of figures.

That difference in a shifting of CBeebies ‘prime-time’, then. I’m willing to bet that it’s also down to a vast increase in programmes being (likely binge-)watched via iPlayer, rather than more kids watching TV between 7am and 8am — a suspicion supported by the lack of other 7–8am programmes (Peter Rabbit, Go Jetters) in those viewing figures.

Was CBeebies Much More Popular During Lockdown?

Here’s an interesting one. With the majority of the population ordered to stay at home for much of the last couple of years, it stands to reason that anyone with young children would have put the telly on. Especially when, speaking from experience, in those early lockdown months, there was little schools could initially do to provide under-5s with home-based education.

The advice we were given by our local school was “take this time to do fun activities with your child”, and that’s what we did, at least as far as circumstances (and also trying to work from home) allowed. But, there were only so many things you could do, especially with the likes of Hobbycraft safely shuttered for the duration. So, CBeebies had much more airtime in BrokenTV Towers. But was that the case nationally?

Well, let’s find out. Using a rolling six-week average for your average viewing figure of a BARB Weekly Top 10 CBeebies show (yeah, keep it simple), here’s a summary from the start of the new ratings methodology in late September 2018, until now. Lockdown dates taken from the Institute For Government.

So, not especially. That was worth the time I spent working that out.

Enough Of All This Nonsense, What Were The Most-Watched Individual CBeebies Programmes Of The Last 20 Years?

Some attitude you’ve got there, mister. Here you go. The top hundred, just for you. Note: a lot of CBeebies Christmas Pantos in there, which weren’t in the list for Top 20 CBeebies Series’. Which is because they aren’t a proper series.

Okay, Fair Enough. What About A Longer Version Of The List From Yesterday? The Most Popular CBeebies Series?

Yeah, go on then. You’ve read this far. Here you go. Some surprising positions in the list:

There, everything that has appeared in a weekly top ten more than ten times. And some shows in surprisingly lowly positions. Aside from the ones mentioned yesterday, The Clangers only at 39, despite the presence of Michael Palin and lashings of nostalgia, the Teletubblies reboot not even making the top fifty, and two shows popular enough to get their own spin-off magazines (Twirlywoos and Swashbuckle) only at 59 and 65 respectively.

And to repeat something mentioned yesterday, CBeebies Bedtime Stories — probably the programme even non-viewers know about (even making the BBC One News and front pages of several newspapers this week, due to a famous celebrity guest) — being way down the list.

Perhaps less surprising that Bill & Ben and Muffin the Mule are way down the pecking order, though. Now, if they’d done an animated reboot of Hancock’s Half Hour…

Anyway, that’s where we’ll probably sing the CBeebies bedtime song and leave it there. At least until the thirtieth anniversary. Now, I’d better start working on something similar for BBC Four’s twentieth anniversary in a few weeks’ time. If the channel lasts that long.

Goodnight, children.