Strictly Come Dancing Ratings 2026: Why 4.8 Million Is a Drop, Not a Disaster, and What Emma Willis Still Has to Prove
Four point eight million people watched the first live Strictly of the series, and by Monday morning that number had been turned into a crisis. Strictly Come Dancing ratings 2026 are down on last year, but it isn’t a crisis. It isn’t nothing either, and the gap between those two statements is where the interesting story sits.
In This Article
- Strictly Come Dancing Ratings 2026: What the 4.8 Million Tells You, and What It Doesn't
- The England v Spain Excuse Is Real, and Still Too Convenient
- Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe: The Verdict So Far
- A Better Scorecard Than One Saturday's Overnights
- The Contestants Are Carrying More Than the Presenters
- Two and a Half Hours Is a Long Time to Ask for on a Saturday
- What Would Change My Mind
So, the number.
Strictly Come Dancing Ratings 2026: What the 4.8 Million Tells You, and What It Doesn’t
The first live show, on Saturday 26 September, averaged 4.8 million viewers on BBC One and peaked at 5 million, according to PinkNews. The same episode last year averaged 6.2 million. That’s a fall of 1.4 million, just under a quarter of the audience gone in twelve months. It was still the most-watched programme of the night, which the BBC was quick to say, but nobody commissions Strictly to win a Saturday by a nose.
The detail that stings more is the sequencing. The launch show a week earlier peaked at 5.8 million and averaged 5.3 million, so the pre-recorded taster outperformed the live show it was meant to sell. TV Guide, drawing on Digital Spy’s reporting, called it the first time since 2019 that the launch outrated week one in the initial figures. A launch show is a trailer. When the trailer beats the film, someone in the scheduling meeting goes quiet.
The BBC’s response was predictable and not wrong: “As ever, overnight ratings do not give the full picture of all those who watch in an on-demand world.” True. A good chunk of any Strictly audience now arrives on iPlayer on Sunday, or on Tuesday while the ironing’s being done. But I’d call that half an argument. It explains why the overnight figure undersells a show. It doesn’t explain why the overnight figure fell by a quarter when the show it’s compared with was measured the same way.
And the figures themselves are slippery. One widely shared report said the launch show averaged 6.2 million, while others attach 6.2 million to last year’s first live episode. If the people paid to count this stuff can’t agree on which week a number belongs to, it’s worth holding any single Monday-morning headline loosely.
The England v Spain Excuse Is Real, and Still Too Convenient
ITV1 put the live Nations League match between England and Spain against Strictly. That matters. Saturday night used to be a BBC monopoly with a few ITV skirmishes around the edges, and a competitive England game pulls precisely the casual, family-on-the-sofa viewers Strictly depends on.
Fair enough.
But a series that needs a good excuse in week one will need another in week five. Football is a one-off. A presenting line-up that doesn’t land, or a show that feels slightly baggier at two and a half hours, is every single week. The sensible reading is that the match explains some of the drop and nobody outside the BBC can say how much.
There’s another small detail in the Digital Spy report that I keep coming back to. After it aired, the Saturday episode topped iPlayer’s most-popular chart, then slipped to third behind an early-release EastEnders and The Split Up, a new spin-off drama. A flagship Saturday entertainment show being overtaken on-demand by a soap’s early release is a minor thing on its own. As a pattern it says plenty about where viewing habits are heading, and it echoes what we found with Time Series 3, where a big opener is no guarantee of a big run.
Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe: The Verdict So Far
The new trio replaced Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman, who both left the BBC, and nobody was ever going to get a smooth ride. When we looked at the new hosts after the launch show, the point was that the real test would be live. The early notes from that test aren’t glowing. Some viewers questioned where the presenters were positioned, and one of them was hard to hear for much of the first episode.
Sound mix is fixable. Chemistry isn’t, and that’s what actually matters. The best Strictly presenting has always been the chatter between dances, the bit where the hosts make a long show feel short. Winkleman and Daly had a dozen series as a double act, if I’ve counted right, and it showed in how little they needed a script. Willis, Widdicombe and Radebe have had a fortnight.
Here’s my slightly contrarian view: the hosts probably aren’t why the audience dipped in week one. The football, a weaker launch hangover and general Saturday-night fatigue all did more damage than whoever was holding the cue cards. But the hosts are very much why people will or won’t come back in November, and that’s a different and harder job. Widdicombe is properly funny, and the real question is whether the show lets him be funny or sands him down into a safe pair of hands.
One more thing on Radebe, since he’s the odd one out. He’s a professional dancer stepping into a presenting chair, which means he’s the only member of the trio who knows what it feels like to be waiting for a score on that floor. That’s a real asset, and so far it’s been the least discussed part of the new line-up.
A Better Scorecard Than One Saturday’s Overnights
If the overnight number is a poor judge, what should you watch instead? I’d use four things.
First, peak against peak, week by week. The movie-week show on 3 October ran for two and a half hours and peaked at 5.6 million, according to the BBC, again the most-watched programme of the night. Set that against week one’s 5 million peak and it’s an increase of 0.6 million, roughly 12 per cent. I’m comparing peaks because I couldn’t find a published average for the second show, so treat it as a direction rather than a verdict.
Second, the Sunday results show, which is where a lot of the audience’s real attachment lives. Third, the consolidated seven-day and 28-day figures, which tend to arrive quietly, if they arrive at all, and rarely get a headline. Fourth, the voting, because people don’t phone in for a show they’ve stopped caring about.
I couldn’t find reliable overnights for the third live show on 10 October when I wrote this, so I’m not going to guess at them. If week three comes in near the 5.6 million peak, the story is a show finding its feet. If it slides back toward 5 million, it’s a bigger conversation, and not one the England match can answer.
The same caution applies across the schedule. We made a similar point about Celebrity Traitors series 2, where 8.9 million for episode one looked soft only because series one’s finale had hit 14.9 million. Context decides whether a number is a warning or a shrug.
The Contestants Are Carrying More Than the Presenters
The most encouraging thing about this series has nothing to do with the hosts. It’s the competition itself. John Nellis and Katya Jones opened with 31 for a foxtrot, the top score of the first night, with Craig Revel Horwood calling it “classy, elegant and graceful”. A week later they scored 23. That’s an eight-point swing in seven days, and it’s exactly the sort of wobble that gets people talking in the office on Monday.
Graeme Hall and Lauren Oakley took 31 for a Godfather waltz in movie week. Delta Goodrem and Kai Widdrington scored 30 and led the combined table on 59, according to Oddschecker’s round-up, with Hall and Lacey Turner chasing on 55. As of 5 October, Turner was the 7/4 favourite to lift the glitterball, while Nellis had drifted out to 6/1. A leaderboard that changes shape this quickly is good television, whatever the overnights say.
Then there’s the public vote. Melanie Walters, the Gavin & Stacey actress, sat bottom of the leaderboard on 30 combined and was saved by viewers anyway. Chris Appleton and Amy Dowden went home on 4 October after a dance-off against Jaime Winstone and Carlos Gu. Motsi Mabuse, Shirley Ballas and Anton Du Beke all backed Winstone, and Horwood, holding the deciding vote, said he’d have done the same.
I’d argue that’s the healthiest sign of the lot. An audience that rescues a well-liked underdog from the bottom of the table is an audience that’s invested, and investment doesn’t show up in an overnight count. Strictly’s real trick has always been making people feel they own the result.
Two and a Half Hours Is a Long Time to Ask for on a Saturday
Here’s a small thing in the first night’s numbers that nobody seems to have picked up. The average was 4.8 million and the peak was 5 million. That’s a gap of just 0.2 million. In plain terms, almost everyone who tuned in at some point was still there at the busiest moment, and the show wasn’t haemorrhaging people through the evening.
So the problem, if there is one, sits at the front door. It’s about getting people to sit down at quarter past six, not about keeping them once they’re in. That points back at the football, the new faces and the habit of Saturday-night viewing, and away from the dancing itself.
Which brings me to the format. The opening live show ran for two and a half hours, with all 15 celebrities dancing and no public vote and no elimination, as PinkNews reported. Movie week was also two and a half hours. I’d say that’s too long, full stop. A first live show where nobody can go home is the flattest night in the Strictly calendar, because the stakes are zero and the scores simply roll over. Two hours, tight, with the results saved for the Sunday show, would do the job. It’s the kind of thing you stick on at half six, drift in and out of while someone makes tea, and realise at ten to nine that you’ve watched the whole thing, and a baggier running time works against that.
The cynical reading is that the BBC wants the length because long shows give iPlayer more to offer and make an evening feel like an event. The practical reading is that a show asking for 150 minutes of attention from a family with a Saturday to get through is asking a lot, especially against live football. I lean practical.
What Would Change My Mind
I’m not arguing that Strictly is fine. A 23 per cent year-on-year drop in the opening live show is a real drop, and the BBC’s on-demand defence only works if it eventually publishes the on-demand numbers in a form people can check. Without that, it’s a claim, not an answer.
Here’s what would shift my view in either direction. A run of Saturdays stuck around 5 million with no football to blame would make this a structural problem. A steady climb through movie week, Halloween and the run-in to the final on 19 December would make it a slow-starting series with a fixable presenting issue. And a results show that keeps its audience would tell us the habit is intact, even if the Saturday slot has softened.
The fix the BBC controls is also the simplest. Publish the seven-day and 28-day figures for Strictly alongside the overnights, in the same breath and with the same prominence. If the on-demand audience is as big as the corporation says, it’s a strong story and it deserves to be told with numbers rather than a line about “the full picture”. If it isn’t, we’d all rather know before Christmas.
There’s a bigger frame here too. The loud claim this year was that streamers have overtaken the BBC, a headline that mostly falls apart in the footnotes. Strictly is the best live test of the other side of that argument: whether an old-fashioned, week-by-week, all-family event can still hold its place when half the country is watching something else on a phone.
Which number do you trust more when you’re deciding whether a show is working: the overnight figure the morning after, or the one the BBC would rather talk about in January?
