Audiences for series two of Love Island have rarely topped 2m

The channel's share of the TV audience in July stood at 16.7% - down from 20.2% in the same month last year.

Philip Schofield's show It's Now or Never was dropped after one episode and the BBC's World Cup final audience was four times larger than ITV1's.

BBC Two and Five also saw their shares fall since last July, while BBC One and Channel 4 registered rises.

Reality battle

ITV1 has been credited with some successes during the summer, such as its coverage of the Beckhams' World Cup party and the �2m it raised for Unicef through its Soccer Aid tournament.

But the channel recorded its lowest ever share of the peak-time audience on 9 July, the evening of the World Cup final, with 9.1%.

And Love Island's audience has been about half the size of that for Channel 4's rival reality series Big Brother.