A constant theme of letters received from the BBC during the
complaints process was that the 2005 series of Dr Who was a "ratings hit". So
pervasive has this notion been that even ardent critics of the series have not
questioned this claim.
But as the above scan from the BBC website illustrates, the
ratings for the final episode were so low that the BBC issued a special press
release blaming the warm weather. So, how true is it that Dr Who was a ratings
success?
Before we can consider this question, we must
define by what is meant by "ratings hit". One definition is that ratings rise;
in other words, more people are watching a programme at the end of a series
than at the beginning. A programme that meets this definition is Poldark;
in 1975, it started with 5 million viewers and, as the series
progressed, the audience rose to 15 million viewers.
The 2005 series of Dr Who was not a "ratings hit" by this definition.
The series started with 9.9 million viewers and ended on 6.1 million (slightly
lower than reported on the BBC website).
An alternative definition is
that ratings hold steady, that is, Dr Who would be a ratings hit by holding its
initial audience. This might be a more appropriate definition, since Dr Who
received a great deal of pre-broadcast publicity, thereby boosting its initial
viewing figures and reducing room for increase. Even according to this
definition, however, the series was not a ratings hit, since viewers declined
by 38%.
To put this decline into historical
perspective, its worth recalling that the 1985 series of Dr Who - which led to
the programme's suspension for 18 months for poor viewing figures - saw only a
13% decline in viewers between the first and last episodes.
So, why the difference in
BBC attitudes between 1985 and 2005? Why is Dr Who suspended for a 13% ratings
decline in 1985, yet hailed as a hit with a 38% fall in 2005? It's all a
question of politics. In 1985, Dr Who was an old programme. Senior BBC managers
like Jonathan Powell disliked it or were indifferent like Michael Grade.
Crucially, no senior managers had attached their name to Dr Who.
In 2005, the return of Dr
Who was made possible by Jane Tranter, the BBC's Controller of Drama
Commissioning; thus, senior BBC decision-makers were involved from the word go.
£2.8 million was invested and it was declared a flagship programme, even
before it was broadcast. There was unprecedented publicity for the 2005 series.
Thus, to admit that Dr Who had failed in 2005 would be saying that the BBC
itself had failed. Since there is no way in which the BBC, as an institution,
can admit to such failure, the collapsing viewing figures of the 2005 series
have been airbrushed out of TV
history.
Let us return to the
BBC news release, presented above. The BBC blames warm weather for the low
ratings of the season's finale. How do we establish the truth of this
explanation? The answer lies not in the ratings of the last episode but in
those of the penultimate episode. If the ratings for the penultimate episode
are higher, then the warm weather might well account for the following week's
lower ratings - but they were broadly the same, 6.2 million. The ratings tumble
had already begun; the weather of 18 June 2005, the date of the last episode,
could not have been to blame.
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