The war-of-words between My Kitchen Rules gatecrashers pushed the cooking competition above the 2 million mark again last night.

The promise of a show off between the ‘Italian Mammas’, Angela and Melina, and new kitchen villains, Ashlee and Sophia (pictured), saw 2.18 million people tune into MKR on Monday night.

Controversy and baddies have shown to propel MKR’s ratings, the last time the show rated above 2 million was the final week for previous villains, the Spice Girls.

The MKR result mashed direct competitor MasterChef: The Professionals, which was again outside the top 20.

MasterChef sat in 15^th place in both the 16-39 and 18-49 demographics with 186,000 and 256,000 respectively, according to OzTam’s preliminary metro ratings.

Nine’s The Block: All Stars performed better against the Seven ratings juggernaut, managing to pull in an audience of 1.194 million to take sixth place.

The Block also achieved third place in both the 16-39 and 18-49 demos behind top runner MKR and Seven’s US drama Revenge.

Revenge was the second most watched program overall with 1.36 million viewers.

Nine won the news and current affair battle with Nine News watched by 1.302 million viewers ahead of Seven News (1.222 million) and A Current Affair pulled in 1.21 million ahead of Today Tonight (1.033 million).

ABC News sat in ninth place with 998,000 viewers while Ten News at Five was watched by 713,000.

Seven’s main channel took a 27.6% share of all free-to-air audiences while Nine won 23.4% and Ten claimed 9.1%.

The ABC had a 15% share while SBS had 2.8%.