By REBECCA BARRY
Coronation Street fans were frustrated by TV One's fragmented screening of the murder special this week, but watched anyway.
Wednesday's heavily promoted double-bill drew 807,000 viewers for the half-hour screening at 7.30pm and 868,000 viewers to the hour-long special at 8.30pm. The follow-up on Thursday had 807,000 watchers.
The murder episodes fell well short of television's top raters so far this year - a Michael Jackson documentary, America's Cup racing and last week's Test the Nation, 1.5 million viewers.
But they outdid the 700,000 fans whose attachment to Coronation Street keep it in the top 10.
One Auckland viewer said the break between episodes on Wednesday, filled by a local interior design show, was infuriating and unnecessary - "I didn't want to watch Home Front's Hottest."
Another blamed the "ridiculous" programming on TVNZ's "unadulterated abuse of power".
A Papakura Coro fan for nearly 40 years said she and friends would have "made a night of it" if the episodes had screened back to back. But she was not concerned by the half-hour interruption.
TVNZ said the programming followed the British format for the murder special, and gave viewers a breather between shows. Censorship had not influenced the decision to screen the special after 8.30pm.
Twenty million saw the special in Britain.
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