Solid return for The Vampire Diaries to ITV2

The third season of The Vampire Diaries drew a solid audience to ITV2 last night.

The American drama, based on the series of novels by the author L.J Smith, returned to ITV2 at 9pm on Tuesday evening for its third series – just a few weeks after its premier on The CW in America. The Vampire Diaries resolves around the residents, human and supernatural, of small Southern town Mystic Falls and stars Ian Somerhalder, Paul Wesley, Nina Dobrev, Kat Graham, Joseph Morgan and Candice Accola. According to overnight figures the season premier, The Birthday, had a solid 450,000 viewers watching with a further 65k watching an hour later on ITV2’s time-shift channel. That gives the episode a combined audience of just over half a million viewers.