Seven bounced back from its worst night for the past year on Sunday to score a narrow win, thanks to good performances from Desperate Housewives, Seven News and Today Tonight. But the most interesting result was the way Home and Away moved past Nine’s new show Temptation for the first time in six nights.

In fact Home and Away scored its first win in the 7pm time slot since Big Brother started around a month ago. It was a solid return to the top spot by the teen soap and a timely one for Seven.

Its new “drama” Last Man Standing debuted at 9:40pm after Desperate Housewives and the result wasn’t great. Fewer than a million viewers (965,000) watched after an average 2.057 million had tuned in to watch Desperate Housewives in the preceding hour. An enormous turnoff!

Seven News beat Nine News by only 4,000 people (1.513 million to 1.509 million), with the margin in Sydney 58,000 in favour of Seven.

Today Tonight was fourth, just in front of A Current Affair: The gap was 13,000 in favour of Seven, with a 41,000 margin over Nine in Sydney as well (and a loss to Nine in Melbourne).

Home and Away averaged 1.316 million and Temptation 1.278 million (it seems to be settling down at between 1.2 to 1.3 million, below Nine’s target of more than 1.4 million viewers).

Deal or No Deal, Seven’s 5:30pm game show, was watched by just over a million people and no doubt helped Seven News and Today Tonight to their wins because Nine’s The Price is Right was down on 629,000 viewers. Frasier was watched by only 324,000 at 5pm, easily beaten by M*A*S*H repeats on Seven with 580,000 people.

Big Brother Live nomination was watched by 1.318 million people at 7.30pm, the normal half-hour show at 7pm 1.257 million and the Big Brother Uncut show later in the night, 1.19 million.

Last Man Standing may have been a touch disappointing for Seven but it still beat Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope on the ABC with 916,000 people.

Seven won by the narrowest of margins, 28.0% to 27.9%, Ten on 22.5%, the ABC on 14.8% and SBS on 6.8%.