Steady start for Cavemen series

Steady start for Cavemen series

Actors spent five hours in make-up each morning

The BBC's new science series Walking With Cavemen pulled in an above-average audience for its timeslot, but it failed to beat ITV1's The Bill.

The £4m series, a follow-up to Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts, pulled in 7.2 million viewers on Thursday at 2000 GMT.

Police drama series The Bill achieved 7.5 million, according to unofficial overnight figures.

By comparison, the first Walking With Dinosaurs programme pulled in 15 million people and achieved a series average of 13.2 million viewers.

Walking With Beasts' debut attracted 8.5 million and a series average of 6.8 million viewers.

A BBC spokeswoman for Walking With Cavemen said she was very pleased with the result.

"The ratings are very good and healthy for that slot," the spokeswoman said, adding that the programme was not comparable to its natural history predecessors.

The series is presented by Professor Robert Winston

"Ancestry has always been a difficult topic to cover and it does not have the same appeal as the subject of dinosaurs, which will always carry that element of intrigue."

The programme's ratings could also have been affected by coverage of the war in Iraq and the fine weather and light evenings, the spokeswoman added.

Both Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Beasts were screened in the winter.

The four-part Walking With Cavemen uses the latest technology to bring prehistoric worlds to life.

It takes the viewer back three-and-a-half million years to explain how modern man evolved from a common ancestor with apes, and ends 30,000 years ago when our ancestors split into two populations.

Together, Walking With Cavemen and The Bill captured more than half the audience watching TV at that time of the evening.

Walking With Cavemen achieved a share of 29.4% while The Bill pulled a share of 30.3%.

On the three other terrestrial channels, the highest number of viewers was 2.5 million for BBC Two's The Nation's Favourite Food.

But the real winner on Thursday night was BBC One soap EastEnders at 1930 GMT after almost 14 million people tuned in to find out finally what had happened to Lisa.