Reading: Tyres Pull in TV Viewers

We knew it, Darren and Abi knew it, even Channel 4 grasped it and now the viewing public have confirmed it – tyres are interesting!

This weeks Grand Design property programme, which showed a couple building a house out of old tyres and mud, pulled off a primetime coup boosting ratings by around a million on the previous week.

And the big news was with 4.2 million viewers it even overtook BBC One’s David Attenborough series, according to unofficial overnight figures.  

The property show, this week focusing on a house in Brittany built from old tyres and mud, won the primetime 9pm-10pm slot with 4.2m viewers and a 17.5% share. Including Channel 4+1 figures it reached 4.4m viewers.

It pulled ahead of BBC One’s ‘Nature’s Great Events’, which dropped 700,000 viewers to 3.7m and a 15.7% share of the audience.

Viewers saw Darren and his partner Adi create a single-storey family house built from tyres ram packed with earth – a concept which originated in Mexico more than 30 years ago to create buildings which are dubbed ‘earthships’.

While the couple chose to build their dream home in France, because planning regulations are more relaxed and it was cheaper, there are already two eco-friendly ‘earthships’s in the UK and plans for a third.

The ‘earthships’ have already landed in Kinghorn, Fife, and Brighton, and now a feasibility study has now been commissioned into the possibility of creating an ‘earthship’ centre at Merkinch Local Nature Reserve.

 Katherine Clarkson, etyres National Accounts Executive

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 10:19 am and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.