Doctor Who, Jack Bauer and Danger Mouse have all topped a list of the nation’s favourite TV heroes.

The time-travelling Doctor managed to beat Sherlock Holmes and Captain James T. Kirk from Star Trek to the top spot.

Meanwhile, mac-wearing detective Columbo came in at fourth place, followed by counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer from 24, in a survey of 2,000 TV fans.

Peter Capaldi might be putting down his sonic sunglasses for good in this year’s Christmas special, but new Doctor Who boss Chris Chiball wanted the actor to stay at the TARDIS controls.

“Chris tried to persuade him to stay,” said former Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat to Broadcast. “I knew it was a possibility that [Capaldi would] leave because Doctors tend to do three years. I thought that he might want to opt out, rather than go through the trauma of a change in command and maybe leaving a year later anyway. But I think he came close to staying.”

Despite how close Capaldi came, Broadchurch creator Chibnall is now leading the search for the 13^th incarnation of the Time Lord – a search that Doctor Strange star Tilda Swindon is now favourite for.

In the same interview, Sherlock co-creator Moffat also spoke about his own departure from Who after the next series, saying he’d almost left the show at the end of Matt Smith’s run:  “For various reasons, during my third series I wasn’t as happy. It was the only time doing Doctor Who where I felt it was slipping away from me a bit. I wasn’t quite as in control of it as I should be. I wasn’t enjoying it as much, and I wasn’t as pleased with it.”

“I didn’t want to leave like that, so I tried to persuade Matt to do another year, but he was determined to go. And then having cast a new Doctor, I had to stay – and I wanted to because I was thoroughly enjoying working with Peter.”

However, Moffat is leaving with Capaldi after seven years at the head of the show – and says he won’t be writing any more Who episodes for a while. Which won’t be easy on him: “I’m sure I’ll miss it for the rest of my life,” Moffat said, “and reminisce to very bored people about how I used to be something, I used to matter, then sob on their shoulder and get kicked out the pub.”

Yet however sad they are to see Moffat leaving, it’s hard for Who fans to be anything but excited at the moment: the new series starts 15th April 2016.

This is a charming article that was written by Kirsten Tranter and was published today in The Guardian Newspaper in the United Kingdom.

One of the joys and also one of the great disappointments of parenthood is sharing one’s own childhood loves with one’s children.

It was delightful to introduce my son Henry to Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree, which he loved, however disturbing so many of those stories are, but it was a little hurtful to find him totally indifferent to The Famous Five. Not even the presence of Timmy the Dog or mysterious smugglers could impress him. He similarly rejects Narnia in favour of the Beast Quest series and is bored by the terribly dubbed 1980s TV series Monkey that I love with nostalgic ardor.

But he loves Doctor Who and some of the most enchanting hours of motherhood for me have been spent with him in front of the small screen watching the same Daleks and Cybermen that terrified me as a child in the 1970s, and the Doctor, with his various faces, his capricious wit, his belief in courage and brains as a solution to problems that would be solved by other heroes with a bullet from a gun or a punch in the face. Tom Baker was my iconic Doctor, David Tennant will be his.

We went to the movies for Henry’s 11th birthday late last year to see Miyazaki’s animated masterpiece Spirited Away on the big screen and watched a trailer for a cinema screening of the annual Doctor Who Christmas special. Can we come to see it, Henry asked eagerly. At first I was excited by the prospect of watching Doctor Who with an audience of fellow enthusiasts – not always easy to find in California’s East Bay, where we currently live – but something about the idea was unappealing. We wound up watching it at home, on the small screen, as seemed proper, but it still left me vaguely dissatisfied and afterwards I realised what had been largely missing from the episode: the Doctor’s spaceship and time machine, camouflaged as a blue police box, the TARDIS.

The magic of the TARDIS has always suggested to me the magic of television itself. Before the advent of the flat screen, television was literally a box – to my eyes as a child, an undeniably magic box capable of incredible feats to do with compressing and changing space and time. I dwelled for hours on what strange technology could be capable of shrinking and transporting people and animated cartoon beings into this luminous space, and replicating them infinitely on other televisions in other houses, other places.

Doctor Who was what I watched at this time, a show all about a magic box that, like the television, was bigger on the inside; like the TARDIS, the TV’s blockish dimensions contained unfathomable wonders, other worlds and brought the accents and cityscapes of America and the UK into our Sydney home. It let you travel in time, in space.

Television was the medium and the metaphor of Doctor Who. I think that this is the source of the disconnect that happened when I saw that trailer at the cinema, why it felt wrong to see Peter Capaldi’s craggy, lovely face and spindly body enlarged and projected like that: the Doctor belongs not on the big screen watched by a crowd but inside my own little box at home.

The TARDIS sometimes seems to me to be a metaphor for the mystery of imagination itself, of consciousness, of individual interiority. The show loves to dwell on those moments when uninitiated characters enter for the first time and struggle to overcome their confusion and amazement, searching for words to express the wonder of the machine other than the classic utterance, “It’s bigger on the inside.” The TARDIS is an intelligent machine; sometimes it refuses to obey the Doctor’s commands and has its own ideas, fears and desires. The painfully sleazy 11th Doctor, played by Matt Smith, liked to address the TARDIS as “sexy.” The consciousness of the TARDIS was extracted from the machine in one of Smith’s episodes and transferred to a human body. She paused and looked around in wonder – or, rather, looked inward – and murmured to the Doctor, “It’s bigger on the inside.”

We haven’t owned a television for years and do all our viewing on our computers; Henry watches Netflix and things on iTunes and, when we have the energy to hook up an external drive, DVDs. He listens inattentively when I describe what television was like when I was growing up with Doctor Who: the program came on at a certain time of day, once a week, and there was no way to record it. You watched it then or you missed it. The television was a clunky box and the image it showed was black and white, prone to frazzling in bad weather, dependent on a flimsy wire aerial. This seems so bizarre to him that I think he suspects me of making it up.

As a child I probably identified more with the companions than the Doctor (one of the companions at the time was even an Australian, the air hostess Tegan) but, with all of the worlds of the internet available to him and his mastery of the machine, Henry likely feels more kinship with the Doctor.

Consolidated ratings are now available for episodes 7 and 8 of Class, shown on BBC One two weeks ago, which include details of those who recorded the programme and watched it within a week.

Episode 7, The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did, which was broadcast at 10.47pm, had a confirmed audience of 0.68 million viewers, a 6.4% share of the total TV audience. The channel average for the timeslot is of 1.85 million. The figure is slightly lower than the initial overnight figure. The programme was beaten in the timeslot by BBC Two’s Newsnight getting 0.81 million, however it outrated Through the Keyhole on ITV which had 0.53 million. An additional 0.20 million have accessed the episode on iPlayer since its release on BBC Three last October. The episode scored an AI of 82.

Episode 8, The Lost, followed immediately afterward, starting at 11.33pm, and had a consolidated audience of 0.32 million watching, a share 5.5% of the audience. The channel average for the timeslot is 0.82 million. The programme was outrated by Hospital on BBC Two, with 0.38 million. Around 195,000 have accessed the episode on iPlayer. The episode scored an AI of 82.

Full ratings for the BBC One screening are shown below. No information has been released by the BBC concerning the future of Class and the possibility of a second series. An online petition asking for a second series has so far received 1700 signatures.