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Toffa reports on the UK Television Viewing Figures for Season 30 of Doctor Who
Early into WIDWWA’s hiatus last year, I was keen to see if there was any material that would help with the rankings for any stories, or even full seasons pre-Season 35. This is because BARB, which I use as the primary source for viewing figures, only goes from July 1998 onwards. It does show the top ten programmes in each year from 1981, but Doctor Who’s viewing figures then, plus the general state of television, didn’t see eye-to-eye, with almost no precise way of knowing any rankings from Season 27, as it would often fail to make it into BBC1’s top 30. This is why you only see all the details in the viewing figures for Season 35 onwards which we’ll begin covering next time. However, I managed to go one step further and came across British Newspaper Archive, which has archives of newspapers; some of which displayed viewing figures for the time. The only evidence for TV ratings that I could find were the top 30 programmes each for the four main channels up to mid1994. Of what I did manage, are the rankings for a full season: Season 30 in 1993 and the 30th anniversary special, The Lords of Time. This is the earliest possible look at how Doctor Who fared ratings-wise as part of WIDWWA from what I can gather. It includes the figures themselves, how it fared on the day, the week’s BBC1 ranking, consolidated ranking and ITV’s competition. This has been in the works since August, and I’ve actually teased this very topic on the WIDWWA Discord along with a not-so-accurate prediction on how Doctor Who avoids getting axed (turns out it wasn’t international sales). So after more than seven months in the making, let’s finally get to it!
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Shortly before Season 30 aired, BBC1 had a new channel controller in the form of Alan Yentob who had moved from BBC2. Yentob was more supportive towards Doctor Who and sci-fi in general (acquiring the rights to Star Trek: The Next Generation for BBC2 for example), meaning that the show was being looked upon more fondly for the first time in years, unlike his predecessors Michael Grade and Jonathan Powell, who wanted to rid off Who in any possible way.
From what we see of the ratings, the season appears to begin on a relatively strong note, and for the summer too, ratings of around 8 million were impressive. There is a small decline for Part Two, which could be attributed to either the reaction to Part One’s cliffhanger, the summer weather, or whatever ITV had on. The first ten minutes of Part One clashed with talent show, Stars In Their Eyes, and managed to win by just several thousand viewers. Despite this, Doctor Who ended up being BBC1’s top show on Saturday. The remaining fifteen minutes aired against one-off comedy-drama, Outside Chance. More viewers opted to watch the Daleks than Brian Conley coming out of prison and deciding to be straight.
For Part Two, Stars In Their Eyes again beat Who for the first half, with the second half against comedy The Upper Hand also narrowly beating Doctor Who, but it was still BBC1’s top show that Saturday. Similar result for Parts Three and Four, albeit with higher ratings, Doctor Who managed to get the upper hand against The Upper Hand twice!
Conquest of the Daleks averaged 8.21m viewers and ranked 31st across its run across all channels for the four weeks it aired in July 1993. A good start for the season, but would viewers keep watching as the summer continued to see the return of Susan Foreman?
Naturally the Daleks would bring in a mass audience, so seeing it drop from the looks of things wasn’t too much of a surprise. But it does appear to not drift off completely; staying above 7m throughout.
With Stars in Their Eyes over, ITV’s competition, The Upper Hand, didn’t hit the mark, so much so that it failed to make it into ITV’s top 30. It meant that for the first time in years, in its timeslot, Doctor Who had finally won out. The statistics show that things peak for Part Three, as it was also the most-watched programme that Saturday for the first time in a considerable while.
An Earthly Child averaged 7.83m, down 0.38m from Conquest, and slipped a little for its average ranking of 35th. Will ratings still hold up as the Doctor encounters his greatest fear?
An improvement from the looks of things, but not without some consequences. Doctor Who’s reign as King of Saturday Night was short lived, as ITV fought back, although it was once more BBC1’s top show for Saturday for Part One. Part Two saw it second for BBC1 for the day behind comedy, Birds of a Feather. Moving to an earlier timeslot, Part One’s competition was a best-of compilation of comedy prank show, Beadle’s About.
Part Two’s first ten minutes was scheduled against Return of the Gladiators, which was a preview of what was to come for Gladiators’ second series airing soon. Keep a close eye, as this won’t be the last time Doctor Who is scheduled against Gladiators this season (or even up to Season 35!), and it’s worth noting that this was one of ITV’s biggest primetime hits. The remaining fifteen minutes were against the 1990 film, Freeze Frame. Doctor Who won against both.
The Enemy Within averaged 8.21m and 30th for the week. The ratings match those of Conquest, and is up by one placement on its ranking and up by five places from the last story, making this the best performing serial so far.
A swift decline we see here based on the rankings. Let’s examine why. First, with the summer over, more people would have likely started to watch TV again, resulting in higher ratings. This doesn’t appear to apply for Doctor Who, and this paved the way for other programmes to either return, or those that had a lull in the summer, re-turn to normality with large viewing figures.
Part One aired against a showing of Superman IV; the latter winning out by a few hundred thousand viewers. Part Two benefited from airing at an earlier timeslot of 6pm; whilst somewhat concerning, paid off with ITV’s competition, Baywatch (of all shows!) getting less than six million. The same can’t be said for Parts Three and Four, where for much of the rest of the season from here, Doctor Who would go up against Gladiators. I did say keep a close eye folks. But it’s not too bad, with Who losing out by only a few hundred thousand for this serial.
The averages for The Left-Handed Hummingbird are 8.23m and 43rd. While ratings are a slim 0.02m up from The Enemy Within, it’s average ranking was down by 13 places. Here’s hoping a return to Gallifrey can turn things around.
Not by much, it seems.
Parts One and Two were again against Gladiators, with the latter’s ratings increasing to 11m by this point.
Part Three, unusually, aired against an episode of US import, seaQuest DV, which proved more interesting to viewers.
The Reverent Peril has an average of 8.23m, matching that of the previous story, but dropped a further seven places down for the rankings at 50th. With one more story to go, can the season end on a high?
It seems so, as ratings managed to hit the 9m mark for the latter half of the serial. Here, it aired against another big ITV Saturday night hit, dating show: Blind Date which again drew in more viewers. Closing the season off, The Legend of Merlin rates at 8.99m, up by 0.76m from The Reverent Peril, and also matches its average rank of 50th.
That completes Season 30’s ratings runthrough, but we’re not quite done yet.
We now come to the main event: the 30th anniversary special, The Lords of Time. A lot was thrown into this to see if Doctor Who really was fighting back. It was two hours long, making it the longest single episode the show has ever ran (excluding movies, remains so to this day) and was particularly a big gamble in the BBC’s part, to sacrifice two of their big Saturday night shows of the time, Big Break and Noel’s House Party for a two-hour anniversary special of a sci-fi show. Somewhat of a good thing for the latter as we would’ve been spared the premiere of the video for Mr Blobby’s single for a week. Thank goodness for small mercies in WIDWWA.
The results turned out to be very successful, for both the BBC and Doctor Who itself, with its highest viewing figures since The Creature from the Pit, Part Two from Season 17 in 1979. The positives don’t end there too. The special made it back within BBC1’s top 10 that week, placing 9th, and ranked 26th across the week for all channels.
Despite such strong viewership, it still wasn’t enough to better ITV’s competition, where a feature-length Doctor Who found itself against three high-profile shows. Its first forty minutes were against Gladiators which received almost a million viewers more than Who. Blind Date followed in the next hour, with the gap closer between it and Who, but ITV still managed to win out. The last twenty minutes took on that year’s Royal Variety Performance and topped the night with almost 15 million viewers. For BBC1 itself, Doctor Who was the second most-watched show that evening, behind Casualty, which aired after it.
And now for the big calculations: how did Season 30 fare overall? Excluding The Lords of Time, it averaged 8.32m, and for average chart placements, ranked 40th. This was an improvement on Season 29’s average figures, which had 8.02m, in spite of no rankings, which would’ve likely been worse than what we’ve seen with Season 30. However, we can see from the rankings it has just pipped within the Top 40, which was a promising sign of things to come.
In conclusion, we can see that in 1993, Doctor Who’s presence in the Saturday night schedule wasn’t quite there yet, as it was clear many programmes were getting 10+ million each week with Saturday nights still performing strongly in general. It could be argued that this was down to ITV’s part as it remained fairly consistent in the BBC’s rankings between the top 10-20. But now, a new production team was set in stone for 1994, as Doctor Who continued into Season 31. And with the BBC starting to find faith in the show now thanks to Yentob’s support, the 1990s was certainly a comeback decade for the programme.
Next time, we go a little into the future, with Season 35’s viewing figures, whereby the attitudes for Doctor Who were about to completely change. A co-production deal was in place, the show was still performing well, and the Saturday night schedule was beginning to lose its charm at the turn of the millennium. Does all this help or hinder Doctor Who come 1998? Who knows? Fortunately from there, most of the complete figures and details are available, so no skipping around going forward!
