TV Ratings - 5x01 (The Eleventh Hour)

[Starkers]

I don't tend to pay too much attention to these figures but the numbers still seem high to me. How low do people figure Who would have to get to be in trouble?

 

[wamdue]

So are you saying all those listings of Eastenders/Coronation Street are multiple showings of the same episodes of each?

no each listing is one episode, Eastenders is 4 episodes a week (plus repeats on BBC 3 & the Sunday Omnibus) whilst Corrie is a 5 episode a week show (plus various ITV 2 repeats, and the Omnibus, which itself gets repeated plenty)

I see...I figured those were kind of like American soaps where they are on multiple days a week...

I think I confused you.

Eastenders has 4 new episodes, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday, starting at either 19:30 or 20:00, on BBC 1 Each episode is then repeat on BBC 3 at 22:00. A Sunday omnibus airs on BBC 1 on a Sunday afternoon.

What you see in the list is the first showing of each episode on BBC 1.

ITV 1 Corrie has 5 episode a week and follow a similar schedule, again its the first airing of the episodes on the list.

ITV 1 also has a second soap called Emmerdale, which airs 6 episodes over 5 days. 5 of the episodes air at 7pm each week day.

Thankfully these shows are 30 minutes, because if they were an hour, nothing else would ever get aired.

 

[wamdue]

I don't tend to pay too much attention to these figures but the numbers still seem high to me. How low do people figure Who would have to get to be in trouble?

I would guess if an entire series never got more than 5.5 million, the BBC would have to take notice, but chanes are they would just regenerate the Doctor, and given the show another chance, if nothing changed they maybe it would get axed, but the concept of regeneration (as well as changing the producer) makes it easy for the show to survive low ratings that might see another show axed. It will get that second chance.

Not too mention Corra has 2 episodes a night on Thursdays I think so you could count them as one episode.

TBH that seems like fiddling the figures to me, you either count each individual episode as one program or you dont.

 

[Savage Jaw]

Final consolidated figures are in for The Eleventh Hour...which was watched by 10.08m (BBC1+HD). That is a massive timeshift, far bigger than Doctor Who has had before. Add that together with the BBC3 repeats, and the nearly million downloads on iPlayer, and a lot of people watched this episode.

More information here

 

[23skidoo]

Final consolidated figures are in for The Eleventh Hour...which was watched by 10.08m (BBC1+HD). That is a massive timeshift, far bigger than Doctor Who has had before. Add that together with the BBC3 repeats, and the nearly million downloads on iPlayer, and a lot of people watched this episode.http://gallifreynewsbase.blogspot.com/2010/04/eleventh-hour-final-figures.html

This is one factor the American ratings system has yet to really embrace. I'm not the only one of the opinion that, for example, Enterprise and Firefly might not have been canceled had time-shifting been taken into account.

The numbers don't concern me for a few reasons: the show has already been renewed for Series 6, and production starts in a couple of months. The BBC is not an NBC or CBS - it won't likely cancel production this late in the game unless the show begins scoring catastrophically low ratings of the 1 or 2 million variety. That's unlikely to happen.

Even during Tennant's era there were some pretty low-rated episodes, and it didn't make a difference in the big picture.

The only number I personally am paying attention to is the Appreciation Index figure, and apparently both Eleventh Hour and Beast Below scored 86 which is considered excellent and only a few points off the record 91 scored by Journey's End. What this means is the people who are watching are liking what they're seeing. That says a lot more than whether on a particular week more people decided to record the episode and go to the park that afternoon, or watch the dog trials instead.

I do wonder why the BBC insists on showing DW at such an early hour when I believe historically the revival has scored its best ratings when shown closer to 7PM. Is there some enforced bedtime for the under-13s over there?

Alex

 

[wamdue]

some international ratings for The Eleventh Hour

First of all I head down under to Ramsay Street, where Doctor Who airs on ABC

13th* Doctor Who ABC1 1,033,000 367,000 243,000 197,000 108,000 117,000

* highest rating show of the day

this is not the final figure, as Who was avabile on the ABC iView, before it aired on ABC 1, so I dont have good figures for that.

and over to the US of A, where the show airs on BBC America.

April 19, 2010, New York, NY- Doctor Who, in a new era for the iconic series, broke BBC AMERICA ratings records with its season premiere this past Saturday, April 17, delivering 1.2 million viewers in Live + Same Day – BBC AMERICA’s highest rated telecast ever... and ranked BBC AMERICA #2 among all ad supported cable nets in its time period (9-10:10PM) among coverage rating.

 

[23skidoo]

Here's a link to the BBC America press release and several media stories covering it:

http://doctorwhointhemedia.blogspot.com/2010/04/bbc-america-press-release-doctor-who.html

What's annoying is BBC America has decided to term it a "reboot" as opposed to just a "new season". As a result you read some of the news reports in places like Hollywood Reporter and you can tell who is familiar with the show and who isn't because some people are treating the term "reboot" in the same way one might use the term "do-over". Or even in the same sense that the 2009 Star Trek film was a reboot. Obviously these folks don't get what Doctor Who is about.

I'll go with "relaunch". That makes sense because everytime we have a new Doctor, it's a relaunch. "Reboot" sounds like starting from scratch, which is simply factually incorrect when you're talking about Doctor Who.

Alex