[Jason.]

Originally Posted by HBIC

BB8 actually debuted really high with 6.6 million viewers (only 0.5m down on BB7 and 0.6m higher than BB6), so CBB5 didn't do that much damage to the actual ratings. But the absolutely awful first few weeks of BB8 + all-female launch night + being up against Britain's Got Talent pretty much killed the series.

BB8 was responsible for the show's demise ratings-wise, not CBB5.

Hmm I partly agree with this. I remember the anticipation being extremely high for BB8 back in 2007, given the hype and success of BB7 the year before and how ugly CBB5 was. People just couldn't wait for BB8 in the summer because they knew it would be better than CBB5 and would follow on from BB5-7, but like you say the first week rated quite well and higher than BB6's first week and roughly the same as BB5's first week but because the production threw silly gimmicks like the all-female launch, people were disappointed and just couldn't be bothered with it and thought it was crap so didn't bother with the rest, so it lost a heavy margin of the 4.7m people that tuned into the first week and it didn't recover since. Had the production been better, the retention of that figure would've been higher.