Seen in the Daily Mail:
BBC’s live afternoon television coverage [of Live Earth] attracted an average British audience of just 900,000.
In the evening, when coverage switched from BBC2 to BBC1, the figure rose to just 2.7 million.
And the peak audience, which came when Madonna sang at Wembley, was a dismal 4.5 million. Three times as many viewers saw the Princess Diana tribute on the same channel six days before.
Two years ago, Live 8 drew a peak television audience of 9.6million while Live Aid notched 10million in 1985.
I haven’t seen analogous figures for the U.S., but I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if ratings weren’t all that great, considering that coverage seemed very limited here.
The Daily Mail article includes a discussion of whether the low ratings in the U.K. were caused by competition with good weather and Wimbledon, or if folks were upset by the hypocrisy of the event.
Personally, while I think there was quite a bit of “preaching to the choir” going on, I wonder if the reduced audience could also have been the result of the lineup itself. I mean, while I know that I and a few other folks were enthusiastic about Nunatak…or any band made up of Antarctic winterovers for that matter… I can see how they might not attract an audience of billions.
I can actually really appreciate the notion that Live Earth was rather hypocritical. In the bits and pieces I caught around housework, I was for example struck by a shot of a performer grabbing a bottled water from a table of them mid-gig…yet bottled water is a pet-peeve of many treehuggers.
However, I can also accept that some of the hypocrisy inherent with staging megaconcerts around the world could be forgivable if it served as a launchpad to help move conservationism into the mainstream.
(True, conservation seems to be relatively mainstream in Europe as viewed from the U.S….but we definitely have a long way to go here in the States.)
For example, consider several of the short films produced as part of the hubbub around Live Earth. Many of them would seem to have great potential as public service ads, and they’d presumably be at least as effective as the anti-drug PSA’s currently on the air in the U.S.
If Live Earth prompted a certain shift towards environmentalism in PSA’s in the U.S., and if those ads were successful in (for example) getting a nontrivial number of folks to remember to not burn excess lights, or to create demand for less wasteful AC-DC transformers (the wall warts for cell phone chargers and the like)…well, then perhaps the hypocrisy of flying pop stars and their entourages to various venues around the world can be forgiven.