Iron Chef Australia began tepidly in the ratings on Tuesday night (Source: Seven Network)

Seven had another easy win in the Tuesday night ratings race, but viewer enthusiasm for its new cooking programme Iron Chef Australia was moderate at best.

Iron Chef Australia began with an average audience of 1.129 million metropolitan viewers last night, according to overnight ratings from OzTAM. The inauspicious figure left it in second place in the 7:30pm timeslot behind Nine's Top Gear Australia (1.218 million); it was also below the number of viewers who watched RSPCA Animal Rescue in the same slot last week.

Seven won the night with a primary channel share of 27.8 per cent and a combined share of 33.7 per cent, and performed a clean sweep of advertiser-friendly demographic groups. Packed to the Rafters was, as usual, the best-performing programme of the night with an audience of 1.795 million viewers.

Meanwhile, Ten continues to flounder in its attempts to bring back viewers lost during its coverage of the Commonwealth Games. The network, whose prospects are being talked up by media buyers, recorded a primary channel share of 18.8 per cent and a combined share of 19.3 per cent last night.

A new episode of NCIS pulled in 1.09 million viewers, leaving it in third place in its timeslot. Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation also suffered from a post-Games ratings drop, coming third against Top Gear Australia and Iron Chef.

Nine had little difficulty in coming ahead of Ten among both total people and younger age groups, registering a primary channel share of 22.7 per cent and a combined share of 28.5 per cent.

The ABC's best programme was ABC News, which ranked eleventh with 966,000 viewers. SBS's lone contribution to the top fifty was Insight (214,000).

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