Was the Doctor Who Christmas special, The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe, a ratings success after all? What do you think...
We don’t usually report on the ratings that a television episode gets, but reading some of the stories that have come out with regards the Doctor Who Christmas special, The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe, we figured it might be worth just clearing one or two things up.
On Boxing Day, it was revealed that the episode had pulled in 8.9 million viewers on its Christmas night transmission. This led to tales of how ratings had dropped, of how it was well down on last year, and stories basically spinning the figures as bad news.
What that number didn’t take into account, of course, is how people tend to watch their television shows. More and more over the past few years, people are recording shows using something like Sky+, or catching up on them using the increasingly-popular iPlayer. Those who choose to do this aren’t accounted for in the overnight ratings, and while an episode of a quiz show may not add too many to its figures once everything is tallied together, scripted dramas tend to.
In the case of Doctor Who, The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe was repeated on Tuesday 27th December, and that added another 1.1m viewers to the tally. And when the final ratings came through yesterday? Well, the show was up to 10.77m viewers, not including that 700,000 or so who have accessed it on iPlayer.
To put that into perspective, it made it the third most watched programme on Christmas Day, after Downton Abbey (and its mountain of adverts!) and EastEnders.
It might make it a less interesting story that Doctor Who’s Christmas special was a ratings success, but it does have the added advantage of being the truth.
Might it just be time for the reliance on overnight ratings figures for immediate post mortems of a show’s success to be ended?
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