The coronation service of King Charles III at Westminster Abbey was watched by a massive audience of 18.8 million viewers in the UK, according to provisional figures. The ceremony was broadcast live on various channels, including BBC One, ITV, and Sky News, and peaked at 20.4 million viewers just after midday when the king was crowned. While this figure is not as high as the ratings for the funeral service of Queen Elizabeth II, which was watched by 26.5 million people, it is still an impressive number considering the vast majority of the UK population, with 22.4 million people reached, making it a shared audience of 89%.
Comparing this figure with the TV ratings of the past is difficult due to the lack of reliable figures for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. At the time, there was no independent organization responsible for compiling and publishing ratings, and the BBC relied on surveys to estimate the number of viewers. According to the BBC’s estimates, the coronation was seen by over 20 million adults in Britain, which is a remarkable number given the limited number of TV households at the time.
King Charles III’s Coronation
The current method of calculating TV audiences was established in 1981 by the audience research organization Barb, and since then, the highest TV audience on record was for the funeral service for Princess Diana in 1997, which was seen by 31.0 million people. The king’s coronation also had a lower combined audience than the televised address by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2020, which was watched by 28.2 million people, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympic Games, which had 24.2 million and 24.5 million viewers, respectively.
However, the coronation did surpass the viewer ratings for the queen’s Platinum Jubilee concert, which was watched by an average of 13.1 million people on BBC One.
