The BBC has revealed just what we’ve been watching on iPlayer in 2020 and Irish drama Normal People is the runaway hit (so far)
The BBC has released the iPlayer figures for 2020 up until the end of November and Normal People based on the Sally Rooney novel of the same name is the clear winner with the audience. In a year when streaming records have been broken everywhere, it’s interesting to see just what we’ve been watching and how lockdown may have affected our viewing.
Normal People garnered an enormous 62,706,000 requests. To give some perspective, Killing Eve series 3 only managed a ‘mere’ 39,344,000. Overall iPlayer has recorded over 5.3 billion requests, some 33% up on 2019 (and Covid-19 must take a lot of the credit). The BBC made a conscious effort to place content on iPlayer at the start of the first lockdown and the service still has a vast range of fantastic content available.
The numbers
The top 10 consists of:
| Rank | Programme | Series | Requests |
| 1 | Normal People | 62,706,000 | |
| 2 | Killing Eve | Series 3 | 39,344,000 |
| 3 | MasterChef | Series 16 | 22,206,000 |
| 4 | The Split | Series 2 | 18,939,000 |
| 5 | Silent Witness | Series 23 | 17,181,000 |
| 6 | The Secrets She Keeps | 16,866,000 | |
| 7 | Life | 15,838,000 | |
| 8 | I May Destroy You | 15,735,000 | |
| 9 | This Country | Series 3 | 15,341,000 |
| 10 | The Nest | 14,684,000 |
If we look at the statistics for single episodes of series, a different picture emerges:
| Rank | Programme | Series | Episode | Requests |
| 1 | Killing Eve | Series 3 | Episode 1 – Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey | 7,398,000 |
| 2 | Normal People | Episode 1 | 6,378,000 | |
| 3 | The Nest | Episode 1 | 4,105,000 | |
| 4 | Dracula | Episode 1 – The Rules of the Beast | 3,489,000 | |
| 5 | The Split | Series 2 | Episode 1 | 3,458,000 |
| 6 | The Secrets She Keeps | Episode 1 | 3,336,000 | |
| 7 | This Country | Series 3 | Episode 1 – A Letter from Slugs | 3,072,000 |
| 8 | Roadkill | Episode 1 | 2,998,000 | |
| 9 | Life | Episode 1 | 2,891,000 | |
| 10 | The Salisbury Poisonings | Episode 1 | 2,670,000 |
Now Killing Eve series 3 dominates this list, but even accounting for episodes per series (Killing Eve had eight versus twelve for Normal People) scaling puts the Jodie Comer series on 4,918,000 per episode (on average) whereas Normal People averaged 5,225,500 per episode across the run.
Normal People is still available on iPlayer (as is Killing Eve series 3) and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Marianne who falls in love with Connell, played by Paul Mescal. The BBC press release on this year’s watching can be found here.