Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Three is celebrating after its Adult Season, a collection of programmes which explored what it means to become an adult in Britain today, brought the channel the best two weeks in its history amongst its target audience of 16-34 year olds.

In the first week of August, the channel's share of young audiences was 5.3% and in the second week the share was 5.2%.

Overall the season, which followed the stories of teenagers at the frontline of becoming adults, reached 18.5 million people and 45% of 16-34 year olds.

The second episode of Underage And Pregnant, a six-part series which went behind the headlines to explore the realities of being a teenage mum, brought the channel its best pre-watershed performance ever with 0.9 million viewers (4.6% share, 10.7% of 16-34 year olds), making it the 11th most watched programme on the channel in 2009.

Young, Dumb And Living Off Mum, in which pampered teenagers competed against each other in challenges set by their parents also performed well, with viewing figures of 0.6 million (2.5% share, 5% of 16-34 year olds) and an AI of 80 amongst 16-34s.

Danny Cohen, Controller, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Three, said: "I'm delighted that the Adult Season went down so well with young viewers. It emphasises young people's appetite for thought-provoking documentary, and gives us more good clues to what our audiences want us to explore with them."

Other strong performances included Pregnancy: My Big Decision (0.8m viewers/3.4% share, 8.3% of 16-34s) and The Autistic Me (0.7m/3.4%, 5.5% - AI of 83).

The season website was also one of the strongest for the channel, peaking with 37,000 unique users, and the programmes also proved popular on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ iPlayer, with four of the programmes from the season featuring in the iPlayer top 20 programmes during the weeks of transmission.

Notes to Editors

More information about the season can be found at bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/adultseason.

The previous best week for the channel was the last week of July (also part of the Adult Season) and the week commencing 13 April - both had a share of 5.1% amongst 16-34 year olds.

EDA