Numbers! More ratings data for Doctor Who
May. 14th, 2013 01:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve11Here is a list of the only Saturday shows that received higher ratings than the Doctor Who episode airing on the same day. The "Count" column is the number of times the show beat Doctor Who (by era) across the run. The "Total" column is the total number of times the Saturday slot of that show appears in the weekly top 30 shows. Broken down by era: RTD vs Moffat:
Var1 RTDCount RTDTotal MoffatCount MoffatTotal
1 AN AUDIENCE WITH NEIL DIAMOND 1 1 0 0
2 ANY DREAM WILL DO 2 19 0 0
3 BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT 8 10 16 17
4 BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT FINAL RESULT 1 1 0 0
5 BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT RESULT 0 0 1 1
6 CASUALTY 8 44 1 31
7 I'D DO ANYTHING - THE FINAL 1 2 0 0
8 MATCH OF THE DAY LIVE 1 10 0 0
9 OVER THE RAINBOW 0 0 1 9
10 RED OR BLACK? 0 0 1 12
11 STRICTLY COME DANCING 0 0 2 2
12 STRICTLY COME DANCING LAUNCH SHOW 0 0 1 1
13 THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST 1 2 1 2
14 THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST 2005 1 1 0 0
15 THE VOICE UK 0 0 4 5
16 THE X FACTOR 0 0 11 11
17 UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE LIVE 0 0 1 2
18 WORLD CUP 2006 ARG V MEX 1 1 0 0
19 WORLD CUP 2006 ENG V PAR 1 1 0 0
20 WORLD CUP 2006 ENG V POR 1 1 0 0
21 WORLD CUP 2006 POST-MATCH 2 3 0 0
22 WORLD CUP 2010 LIVE 0 0 1 6
There are a few Britain's Got Talent outliers: ie, times Who beat that show for the day, on the chart. The RTD outlier is the series 3 episode "Blink", which beat the reality show on its airing on June 10, 2007.
DATE CHANNEL RANK NAME DOW AIRTIME VIEWERS
5407 06/10/07 BBC1 7 DOCTOR WHO SAT 1909 6.62
5472 06/10/07 ITV 12 BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT SAT 2125 5.20
The Moffat outlier is spurious actually: ITV HD was split for one of the weeks in the list, and so there was a small number recorded for Britain's Got Talent on that HD channel. The other RTD outlier is for a week that DW didn't air, but my code counted the NA value I think. I double checked the numbers and am pretty sure neither era gained as many veiwers on a Saturday as Britain's Got Talent did, except for "Blink".
There are a couple of newer programs
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lost_spook clarifies below: they are new to Moffat era Who because of the shift from spring/summer to autumn). The first is Strictly Come Dancing, which was the lead-in show for two Moffat era episodes: 6th season finale (The Wedding of River Song) on October 02 2011, and 7ath season 3rd episode (A Town Called Mercy) on September 16th, 2012.
DATE CHANNEL RANK NAME DOW AIRTIME VIEWERS
13023 10/02/11 BBC1 3 STRICTLY COME DANCING SAT 1800 8.75
13027 10/02/11 BBC1 7 DOCTOR WHO SAT 1905 7.67
13561 09/16/12 BBC1 1 STRICTLY COME DANCING SAT 1829 8.96
13562 09/16/12 BBC1 2 DOCTOR WHO SAT 1936 8.42
The standalone series 7a story retained viewers better than the series 6 finale. The main shows that seem to top Moffat-era Who, that RTD era did not have to contend with, were "The X factor" which I think is a reality show, and "The Voice UK". RTD era had to contend with "Any Dream Will Do" which was kind of an earlier version of the more popular "song contest" reality shows.
So for the most part, on Saturdays, the only shows seeming to consistently beat Doctor Who are the big contest shows, and sports. There are these other shows: Casualty, Over the Rainbow, and Red or Black? that I'm not sure what they are. Casualty sporadically beat both eras in the ratings. In season 1 they were sparring back and forth for the 5 & 6 rankings for BBC1. Casualty beat DW 5 times in season 1 (Aliens of London, World War 3, The Long Game, Boom Town, Bad Wolf), twice in season 2 (The Impossible Planet & The Satan Pit), and once in season 3 (Evolution of the Daleks). It beat Moffat era once (The Hungry Earth). The show had also dropped a bit in its BBC rankings on Saturdays as well during the Moffat era and was more separated from DW in the ratings for Moffat's era than RTD's.
If we expand the popularity out to the week instead of just on Saturdays, the powerhouse shows that consistently outrank DW in terms of ratings are mostly soaps. Below is the list of all shows that outranked DW more than once in the same airing week throughout its entire 88 episode run (all regular season airings up through Journey to the Center of the TARDIS), with a summary of the number of shows that had a one-off outranking as well:
NAME ALLEras RTDCount MoffatCount
1 CORONATION STREET 376 232 144
2 EASTENDERS 263 157 106
3 EMMERDALE 140 112 28
4 BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT 46 18 28
5 NEW TRICKS 23 16 7
6 HEARTBEAT 19 19 0
7 THE X FACTOR 18 0 18
8 THE APPRENTICE 10 5 5
9 BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT RESULT 10 0 10
10 CASUALTY 9 8 1
11 UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE 8 8 0
12 WORLD CUP 2006 POST-MATCH 6 6 0
13 DOWNTON ABBEY 6 0 6
14 WORLD CUP 06 5 5 0
15 MATCH OF THE DAY LIVE 5 5 0
16 WORLD CUP 2010 LIVE 4 0 4
17 THE VOICE UK 4 0 4
18 STRICTLY COME DANCING 3 0 3
19 MIDSOMER MURDERS 3 3 0
20 LEWIS 3 0 3
21 HOLBY CITY 3 3 0
22 DOC MARTIN 3 0 3
23 BROADCHURCH 3 0 3
24 BBC NEWS 3 2 1
25 WORLD CUP 2010 POST-MATCH 2 0 2
26 THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST 2 1 1
27 KINGDOM 2 2 0
28 COUNTRYFILE 2 0 2
29 ANY DREAM WILL DO 2 2 0
30 X FACTOR BATTLE OF THE STARS 1 1 0
31+ (OTHER SINGLETON SHOWS) 57 33 24
You see the Saturday shows again but there are some others as well, weekly television. I don't know what "New Tricks" and "Heartbeat" are. There was also an X-factor type show in the RTD era: X Factor "Battle of the Stars", which I did highlight in the table since it is an X-factor kind of show. It aired in the same week as DW for two weeks in 2006 (episodes were "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit"). Every weekly instance of Battle of the Stars was out-ranked and out-viewed by the two-parter episodes on Saturday, except that the Monday airing of Battle of the Stars received more viewers than "The Satin Pit" on the week ending June 11, 2006.
But this was not the same powerhouse show as the X Factor that aired in 2011 and 2012. I present summaries of the viewers and weekly rankings for each, below, to demonstrate.
$`2006 X FACTOR BATTLE OF THE STARS`
$`2006`$Viewers
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
4.420 5.515 5.840 5.752 6.130 6.620
$`2006`$`Weekly Rank`
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
14.00 20.50 23.50 25.00 28.75 40.00
$`2011 X FACTOR`
$`2011`$Viewers
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
10.13 10.63 10.97 10.91 11.15 11.74
$`2011`$`Weekly Rank`
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
1.0 1.0 1.0 1.4 2.0 2.0
$`2012 X FACTOR`
$`2012`$Viewers
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
7.500 8.390 8.700 8.752 9.350 9.760
$`2012`$`Weekly Rank`
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
2.000 2.000 3.000 3.889 4.000 9.000
I focused in on three soaps (Coronation Street on ITV, Eastenders on BBC1, and Emmerdale on ITV) since they are nearly always consistently higher. I focused on the Monday soap airing as it was almost always the highest of any of the weekly airings. I made some plots to see what the main trends are for the soaps vs. the seasons of DW that were aired later on in the same week.
Here are some pictures. The round dots are DW, the triangles are the soap. You should be able to click through to see the original.
Coronation Street:
Eastenders:
Emmerdale:
A couple of things you can see are that even the Monday night airing of the soaps has a downward trend in many of the same ways that the DW episodes do, and the ratings for these also sink from year to year. I think this is probably due to the availability of more channels or of other ways of watching?
At any rate, you can also see some individual trends too, particularly Davies strong finishing finales that buck the downward trend. This may be due to budgets and also as I had noted before, Davies "throw the kitchen sink as well as Daleks, Cybermen and the Master" attitude toward finales as opposed to Moffat's "longer game" that answers the puzzles more of his own creations (River Song, the Pandorica, etc). The last few episodes of series 7 are downward trending a bit more forcefully, but that curve shouldn't be extrapolated until we see more results. There is also a bit of a learning curve here as Moffat's throwing together different concepts: the split season and the introduction of the new Companion Clara. The soaps also seem to be bucking the downward trend for series 7. This might be due to the first half of series 7 taking place in the fall. Actually only Moffat has had episodes air in September/October. I looked at them and season 7a did better than the season 6 episodes that aired at the same time. Series 7b is still doing a bit worse by magnitude alone than other episodes airing in April/May, but we should account for the general ratings trend too.
I also looked at the relative ranking of Eastenders (the Monday showing) vs. Doctor Who by week for just BBC1. The picture below shows the difference in rank (DW - Eastenders : the figure is mislabeled) between Eastenders and DW for the week.
A negative number is an indication that DW actually ranked higher than the Monday episode of Eastenders on BBC1 for that week. This did not happen very often:
DATE Episode Title AI DW.View Rank EE.View Rank
24 07/02/06 12 Army of Ghosts 86 8.190 3 7.23 6
25 07/09/06 13 Doomsday 89 8.220 5 8.20 6
48 06/15/08 10 Midnight 86 8.050 3 6.78 6
49 06/29/08 12 The Stolen Earth 91 8.780 2 8.61 3
50 07/06/08 13 Journey's End 91 10.570 1 7.57 3
60 06/06/10 10 Vincent and the Doctor 86 6.761 2 5.95 3
69 06/05/11 7 A Good Man Goes to War 88 7.510 2 6.22 7
78 09/16/12 3 A Town Called Mercy 85 8.420 2 8.35 3
Both of RTD's powerhouse two-part finales appear on here, as well as Moffat's mid-season 6 finale. Now if you look at the charts, you will see Moffat's two mid-season episodes there, as well as RTD's Midnight, beat out EastEnders because Eastenders was unusually low, and not because those episodes were unusually high. I checked the data and Eastenders was head to head with Britain's Got Talent on ITV for the Moffat dates, and with "Euro 2008 Live" for the RTD date (soccer?). So those are likely spurious. However, be still my heart, Ben Browder can still win over the
Lastly, the decreasing trend overall in ratings across the seasons: here is a plot of aggregated counts per week of all the top 30 shows on the 5 channels (BBC1, BBC2, Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV), as well as, starting in 2008, the top 30 counted from all other channels as well. This aggregates multiple people because it's summing views across the week, so eg, there are not really 200 million unique viewers in Britain. The x-axis is "Episode" but I've split out the gaps, barring a few in RTDs seasons where they skipped a week on account of Eurovision.
Right, tis 1am, time for bed now. Hope you enjoyed these tables and charts.
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no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 01:28 pm (UTC)Also, note: New Tricks is a fun mystery/cop show featuring 3 "retired" male cops and their new younger (and female) boss. They solve cold cases. I've actually seen it run on PBS here.
(Huzzah Ben Browder!!!)
no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 05:20 pm (UTC)Casualty is a long-running hospital soap drama. (Casualty being our name for the Emergency Room (?I think that's the US term). "We'd better get you to Casualty!") Holby City is its sister show, set on a regular ward in the same hospital.
The Voice is new. Any Dream Will Do is the same as OVer the Rainbow. (They, and How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria, and the Oliver one, the name of which I can't recall, were all talent shows where the aim was to find the lead in Andrew Lloyd Webber's next West End musical. They just each had a different name.)
Heartbeat is a now-cancelled long-running drama set in 1960s Yorkshire (and filmed near me). My sister is obsessed with it and we have to go and see where they film it every time she comes up.
The difference with the autumn/fall figures might in part be because the channels tend to save their biggest shows for the autumn - September is the main "new season" point of the year, though we have had much more happening in Winter/spring than we used to.
And, yes, the big two soaps (Corrie, and EastEnders, followed by Emmerdale), plus Strictly, The X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent are pretty much the biggest things going.
It's all v interesting, anyway. :-)
ETA: And, I second that New Tricks is fun. (It's available on the iPlayer in some countries, but I don't know which ones.)
no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 05:26 pm (UTC)ETA: Oh, so Heartbeat was cancelled... we could look up its ratings & see if/how they showed problems...
no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 06:54 pm (UTC)Heartbeat was cancelled, but it was an ITV show, not BBC (ITV are commercial, so ratings matter more) and, anyway, it was about 15 years old or more by that point. They would have been into the 80s if they'd continued for too much longer and the whole point was that it was a nice 1960s nostalgic thing about policing in the Yorkshire moors.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 10:19 pm (UTC)If I remember correctly, it wasn't the ratings which caused Heartbeat to be cancelled. Basically they had a surplus of two/three series worth of episodes, so they decided to end it there rather than spend more money making new episodes. ITV is a bit funny with drama, with a few exceptions there aren't many shows that last more than a series or two. If I'm remembering correctly, they culled a lot of shows around the recession and have pretty much stuck of soaps, football and reality shows. Broadchurch has been their first 'big' drama series in quite a while. If you compare them to the BBC, who are known for their drama they're quite different as ITV is more reality tv and soaps.
Also I don't know if it helps but Heartbeat, New Tricks, Casualty, Holby City, Midsomer Murders and Lewis have audiences fairly skewed older. A good proportion of their audience are at least 40+, although obviously not all.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 11:35 pm (UTC)Let's put it this way, I only left school a couple of years ago and I never heard a single person say they watched any of the shows I mentioned. If it did come up they'd normally say their grandparents watched it.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 06:28 pm (UTC)And I think because availability has gotten so much broader, that is why we see such drops in Show. People will watch East Enders, DVR DW or DL DW and watch it later. So HOW we view shows now really contributes to the drop in numbers. We see less of that in RTD's era because the availability/range of was just coming into play.
IF that makes sense...
*HEADDESK*
no subject
Date: 2013-05-14 10:07 pm (UTC)People will watch East Enders, DVR DW or DL DW and watch it later. So HOW we view shows now really contributes to the drop in numbers. We see less of that in RTD's era because the availability/range of was just coming into play.
Exactly! And in this case too, Eastenders and the other soaps are more a proxy for what's going on that week outside of TV, since they aren't going head to head with DW, or even on the same night. But it does raise the question... why do they show similar trends? How do people watch soaps and why do the soaps even seem to trend down across the seasons? One would think, with an ongoing story that is being told, people want to stay caught up. How much casual watching is there?
Series 5 and series 6 seem to follow the soap trend more so than 1-4 and 7, even... could that be because those series were more... serial ... than others?