This year's Melbourne Cup and the first wedding on Packed To The Rafters have scored record television audiences.
The Melbourne Cup stayed true to its description as the race that stops the nation with more than 2.5 million Australians tuning in to watch Shocking's triumph on Tuesday afternoon.
It made it the best rating Melbourne Cup since the current ratings system began in 2001, according to data from the Seven Network.The largest audiences were in Melbourne, where more than 1.3 million watched, followed by Sydney with 637,000 tuning in.
Later in the evening, also on the Seven Network, the wedding of Ben Rafter, played by Hugh Sheridan, and Melissa Bannon, played by Zoe Ventoura, pulled in the most viewers in the history of the hit family drama.The episode attracted an average national audience of 2.072 million, across the five major cities.
Rival networks couldn't compete with Seven on Tuesday - it finished with the top seven programs, giving it an impressive 36.1 per cent audience share.The only two non-Seven shows to make the top 10 were a repeat of US crime show NCIS on Network Ten and 20 to 1 on the Nine Network.
Nine was second with a 24.8 per cent share, followed by Ten with 21.6 per cent and, the ABC with 13.1 and SBS 4.4.Meanwhile, Network Ten is expected to score millions of viewers on Wednesday night for a telemovie based on the murder of Sydney model Caroline Byrne.
Starring Caribe Heine as Caroline Byrne, Garry McDonald as her father Tony and David Lyons as her boyfriend Gordon Wood, the movie uses court transcripts and records to tell the story of events leading up to and following Byrne's death at the Gap in Sydney in 1995.
