Jodie Whittaker’s debut episode, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, scored the biggest Doctor Who series launch in a decade on Sunday night.
An average of 8.2 million tuned in to see the Thirteenth Doctor crash land in Sheffield, beating the BBC’s other Sunday night ratings behemoth, Bodyguard, which drew an audience of 6.7 million viewers back in August – although time will tell if Doctor Who follows it’s example and continues to draw in more viewers as the series goes on. What’s more, there wasn’t a significant drop off, with figures staying above 7.8 million across the whole hour.
Accounting for just over 40% of the audience share for Sunday, the Doctor’s clash with Tim Shaw was the most watched episode of Doctor Who since 2008. Her debut also bettered those of Matt Smith – who drew an audience of 7.7 million – and David Tennant – if you class New Earth as his debut episode, which was watched by 8 million.
Perhaps the most interesting figure to emerge was tweeted by Robin Parker, which was sourced by the audience measuring system BARB.
More girls than boys (under-16s) watched Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor Who debut – 378,000 v 339,000. Last year’s series opener: 143,000 girls / 390,000 boys.
— Robin Parker (@robinparker55) 8 October 2018
So Doctor Who managed to keep a large chunk of its core audience while gaining more girl viewers for that age demographic. When compared to New Earth, the figures are down but there’s an upshot.
run numbers on New Earth (2006): Kids made up bigger part of audience then: 17% of total. Show had 50% of all kids watching. (bigger problem has been how to replace them).
Anyway, that’s 1.4m. Of these, 636K were girls, So smaller number now but upwards trajectory on last year— Robin Parker (@robinparker55) 8 October 2018
The official figures, which will be released next Monday, will also include those who recorded the episode and watched it later, so we could see these numbers grow considerably.
Doctor Who returns this Sunday with The Ghost Monument on BBC One.
