17m up for early morning Brazil defeat

Nearly 17 million people watched England's World Cup defeat in the quarter-final against Brazil.

This was the biggest audience for a Friday morning on any channel in the past 10 years, the BBC said.

An average of 12.4 million watched the BBC compared with the average of 3.6m illion watching ITV.

But ITV were delighted that they were able to narrow the gap on their rivals with a ratio of 3/1 watching the game on BBC compared with the 4/1 that watched England's second-round victory over Denmark last week.

The overall audience to England's quarter-final defeat against Brazil on Friday morning peaked at 16.9 million - which was the highest of the World Cup so far, surpassing the 16.8 million audience for the Denmark match.