The live launch of Big Brother’s latest series, Power Trip, was by far the most talked about TV show on television last night, attracting a whopping 185,063 tweets across its hour and a half on the air and the 30-minute period either side, and peaking at a rate of 3,919 tweets per minute.

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Despite being in its 15th series and now attracting average audiences well below those of its heyday, Big Brother proved it is still a show the public love to talk about, easily outgunning every other programme in the social media stakes as host Emma Willis welcomed the first of two new batches of fame-hungry housemates.

Question Time, a traditional favourite with the Twitterati, could only manage 26,000 tweets last night, with a peak of 565 per minute, according to numbers from social media analysts SecondSync.

ITV’s big ticket documentary, Life of Ryan: Caretaker Manager, which followed Ryan Giggs's four weeks in charge of Manchester United, failed to score big numbers against BB too, attracting just 14,500 tweets between 8:30pm and 10:30pm, with a peak of 633 tweets per minute.

Big Brother, now hosted by Emma Willis, moved to Channel 5 in 2011 after spending a decade on Channel 4. At its height in 2002, the show averaged 5.8m viewers across 72 episodes – last summer, Big Brother 2013 managed just 1.9m across the series and launched last night with an overnight average of 1.97 million.

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Yet for Channel 5, whose primetime shows regularly fail to break the 1 million mark, Big Brother remains a success – in terms of both viewing figures and that all-important social media buzz.

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A second batch of new contestants will enter the house tonight in part two of Big Brother: Power Trip Live Launch at 9pm on Channel 5

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