The adventures of one Plasticine man and his dog helped the BBC to dominate the Christmas Day ratings battle, capping a year in which the corporation outstripped its rivals by record margins.

The return of Wallace & Gromit to the small screen to face the dreadful perpetrator of a series of bread-related killings, in A Matter of Loaf and Death, attracted 14.3 million viewers.

The 30-minute animation outgunned even the travails of Doctor Who in Victorian London, which was watched by 11.7 million, and the climactic Christmas Day conclusion of EastEnders, which attracted 11.5 million. The Queen's Christmas Message, broadcast on BBC One and ITV1, attracted a combined audience of 7.8 million - enough to achieve tenth place in the day's best-rated shows but not enough to beat Blackadder (7.9 million), BBC News (9.5 million) and the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special (8.6 million).

Wallace & Gromit's audience made it the biggest Christmas Day show for five years and the biggest show of the year on any channel.

ITV1 relied on its soaps for its peak audiences. Coronation Street pulled in 7.4 million viewers, yet the channel has long conceded defeat on Christmas Day, preferring to woo advertisers in the weeks before, when The X Factor and I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! conclude.

BBC One extended its lead over ITV1 to more than three percentage points, attracting 21.7 per cent of all viewers, compared with the 18.5 per cent its rival attracted, reflecting a year of disappointments in drama programming, where it once dominated.

Nearly two years after he took over at the commercial channel, Michael Grade presided over a relaunch of ITV aimed at winning back middle-class viewers, but the key shows flopped, including The Palace, a House of Windsor drama, and Britannia High, an effort to replicate the success of Disney's High School Musical. News at Ten, reintroduced at the beginning of the year, attracts only three million viewers against the 4.5 million for the Ten O'Clock News. The BBC late-evening bulletin has barely lost viewers, even against Sir Trevor McDonald and the famous “bongs”.

ITV can take comfort that it transmitted several of this year's most-watched programmes. An ITV spokesman pointed to the success of Britain's Got Talent, which pulled in 14 million viewers, and “record-breaking performances from the likes of The X Factor, Dancing on Ice, Coronation Street and Champions League football”. Up until Christmas Day, those were four of the five most-watched programmes in the whole year, with only Strictly Come Dancing preventing a clean sweep.

This year, at peak time, where ITV1 has traditionally invested more heavily, BBC One took a decisive lead. It ended the year with an unchanged 22.5 per cent share - meaning that more than one in five viewers watching television in the evening were tuned to it. ITV1 dropped back to 21 per cent, compared with 22.3 per cent last year.

When ITV was created in the 1950s, it immediately became Britain's most-watched channel, a position it held until the turn of the decade. Since then BBC One has proved far more resistant to the erosion affecting all the big networks, as viewers drift to niche digital channels.

This year, in drama, the BBC has enjoyed hits with programmes as diverse as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a Thomas Hardy adaptation, and Survivors, a remake of a Seventies sci-fi drama that follows the fate of those who survive after a virus kills off the majority of the population. ITV, which once made Cold Feet and Inspector Morse, has had only intermittent hits in recent years.

Mr Grade's problems were exacerbated by the collapse in advertising as the economy went into recession, and the share price of his company tumbled 55 per cent this year. Although the commercial broadcaster still pledges to spend £1 billion a year on television, strained finances meant that it had to abandon an adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, starring Matthew MacFadyen.

Channel 4 retained its lead over BBC Two, at 8.2 per cent against 7.8 per cent, despite a lack of Celebrity Big Brother, which returns next month. Five, helped by seizing Neighbours after 20 years on BBC One, held its share at just over 5 per cent.

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