The soaring temperatures and catastrophic bush fires fuelled consumption of news shows last night, with Nine’s rolling coverage across the afternoon leading to top ratings with 1.248m viewers for the extended 6pm bulletin.

Seven News was also buoyed by extensive coverage of the disaster, with 1.255m, and Today Tonight picked up 1.063m with special reports on the heatwave, according to the OzTam Overnight figures.

ABC News was fourth (962,000) whilst Ten News at Five broke into the top ten with 737,000.

Away from current affairs a repeat of New Tricks was the highest rating show (944,000), beating a repeat of Seven’s Border Security (835,000).

Seven’s touching story of an unlikely friendship between an elephant and a sheep, Wild and Wooly, rated higher than Nine’s two episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which pulled in 687,000 and 638,000 respectively.

Seven dominated the night with 28.3% network share, Nine was second with 24.9%, ABC third with 22%, Ten fourth with 17.7% ahead of SBS with 7.1%.