Jock Zonfrillo died aged 46 last week (Picture: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images for AFI)
The MasterChef Australia season premiere was watched by 761,000 people after Jock Zonfrillo’s death aged 46.
The programme made its prime time debut in a 7.30pm time slot after a one-hour tribute to the late judge on Channel Ten’s The Sunday Project.
The delayed episode did well in the 25-54 year old demographic, pulling in 345,000 viewers.
With 761,000 total viewers across the country, it beat the competition with Farmer Wants A Wife trailing behind with 609,000 viewers, while the penultimate episode of Lego Masters came in third with 567,000 people tuning in.
Meanwhile, the tribute show also captured the attention with 610,000 people watching The Sunday Project – which a massive increase on the 246,000 tuning in the previous week.
When it came to the MasterChef episode itself, fans were devastated watching Zonfrillo on screen for the final time.
MasterChef Australia fans were devastated as they watched the episode (Picture: Ten)
‘Every time Jock speaks,’ one fan wrote with a crying emoji,’ while another added: ‘I can’t get past this. Nup. I think it’s going to take me some time. My heart breaks.’
A third viewer tweeted: ‘Jock said, “What a time to be alive”. Life is so precious and nobody knows what’s ahead. This comment from him is heartbreaking.’
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Last week, Zonfrillo’s family released a statement confirming his shocking death, stating: ‘With completely shattered hearts and without knowing how we can possibly move through life without him, we are devastated to share that Jock passed away yesterday.’
During Sunday’s special tribute show, notable figures within the culinary entertainment world paid tribute to the late star’s memory.
‘He was never done as a chef, he still had years to go,’ Hell’s Kitchen star Gordon Ramsay said, adding that spending time with his late friend on MasterChef had been ‘electrifying’.
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‘Being in the environment together sort of took us back 20 years, there is something quite amazing about two Scots coming together in Australia, it makes you happy at the end of the day,’ he said.
Ramsay added that there was ‘always something quite encouraging’ about everything that they’d been through ‘to get to where we’d been’.
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He shockingly died last week aged 46.