The ratings are falling!! The ratings are falling!!

Doctor Who has been the linchpin of BBC One’s Saturday night schedule for a decade now. But with audience figures apparently on the decline – just 4.6m tuned in live to watch the latest series premiere – is the show facing an uncertain future?

Here, we take a long look at the tough questions being asked of the sci-fi series, and pose one of our own: Is it really as bad as all that?

Why are the ratings falling?
Much like the gulf between the interior and exterior dimensions of the TARDIS, when it comes to Doctor Who’s ratings ‘crisis’, it’s all a matter of perspective.

The way in which people consume television has changed enormously since the show’s return in 2005, and continues to change. Of course, to suggest that nobody watches live TV anymore would be inaccurate – just look at The Great British Bake Off and its insane 10m overnights.

But just because fewer people are watching Doctor Who live than 10 years ago does not mean that fewer people are watching it, full stop.

There’s still an audience there for the show – a sizeable one – but a large percentage is no longer tuning in on Saturday evenings, particularly when there’s so much else competing for their attention. ITV is presenting particularly strong opposition this year, lining up a deadly double in The X Factor and the Rugby World Cup.

Episodes of Doctor Who increasingly find their audience in the week that follows. Series nine opener ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ managed what’s known as a live+7 rating of 6.5 million viewers – that means almost 2 million caught up in the seven days after original broadcast.

BBC iPlayer also logged 1.5 million requests for the episode – and though that original 2 million bump takes iPlayer via television into account, it does not include those who watched on their phone or tablet.

In fact, for the week ending September 20, ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ was the 7th most-watched television episode on-demand, on all platforms. It was bested only by an episode of drama Doctor Foster (no relation), several editions of EastEnders and – of course – the behemoth Bake Off.

Perhaps the secrecy surrounding the show has reached such levels that people don’t even know when it’s on. Maybe a complete crackdown on spoilers is backfiring. Because the hard truth is that Doctor Who’s overall ratings have dipped a little.

But catch-up services are its saviour – and with everything taken into account, the overall decrease really is pretty minimal.

Is Doctor Who now written only for fans?
This is an accusation that’s been flung about a lot – that the series is increasingly being produced for an ardent few, rather than for a wider audience. Russell T Davies – some allege – made big, broad Doctor Who for the masses, while Steven Moffat makes dark, insular Who for the hardcore.

The latest series launched with a double bill that took in the Daleks, their creator Davros, the Doctor’s old rival The Master (now ‘Missy’) and featured multiple references to – even footage from – old episodes. So is the show increasingly looking inward when it should be branching out?

A decent measure of how the general public – the non-hardcore – are reacting to Doctor Who is the Audience Appreciation Index, a survey conducted on behalf of the BBC Audience Research Unit.

The Audience Appreciation Index (or AI) awards TV shows a score out of 100, based on selected viewer responses. The average score for drama across the BBC and ITV is 77, with a score of 85 or over considered excellent.

‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ and its follow-up ‘The Witch’s Familiar’ – for all their fannish nods to the past – scored 84 and 83 respectively. Not too shabby – and certainly not a dramatic drop-off from the RTD era. 84 was also the average score for series two of Doctor Who in 2006.

It’s not definitive, but certainly a strong indicator that Doctor Who hasn’t become so impenetrable as to shut out casual viewers.
Is it time for Steven Moffat to go?
“Moffit MUST GO” is the battle cry of fans unhappy with Doctor Who’s current direction. Moffat (with an ‘a’) has served as the show’s head writer and executive producer – to use an American term, its ‘showrunner’ – for six years now, substantially longer than his predecessor.

“I thought I’d be gone by now, to be honest,” he admitted in a recent interview with TV & Satellite Week. “I thought I would get tired by it, and of it. But I haven’t. So I take it a year at a time.”

Fans who want Moffat gone – whether he likes it or not – allege that he’s running out of ideas. That accusation came out a lot when it was announced that Alex Kingston’s arch archeologist River Song would be back (again!) for this year’s Christmas special.
But while he does continue to trade on old favourites – as Doctor Who writers and producers have always done – Moffat is also far more bold when it comes to rewriting the show’s mythology than many of his forebears have been.

This is not a man who’s short on new concepts – one moment in ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’ threatened to twist the show’s very origins, suggesting that something other than a thirst for adventure factored into the Doctor’s decision to leave his home planet.

Doctor Who under Moffat has changed dramatically, both on- and off-screen. Everything has changed – from cast, to production team, to story structure, to the way the show looks – so to decide that it’s grown stale under his tenure seems like a dubious judgement.
Is it time for Doctor Who to be rested?
So the ratings aren’t all that bad, the general public still seems satisfied with the show’s direction, and Moffat – regardless of what some might think of his take onDoctor Who – is certainly not tapped out.

All the same, 10 years is a long time – and perhaps the biggest problem facing the show right now is apathy. Not from the fans, not even from the wider viewing public, but from the media.

Doctor Who continues to do what it’s always done, and well, but that’s not always enough to grab a headline. Moffat has even spoken about his fear that the show will become ‘part of the furniture’: “That’s when a show dies – when people think it’s fine, that it’s okay, and it’s reliable like a pair of slippers.”
If it wants to makes headlines again – not just when a Doctor is cast, or a companion leaves, but every single week, maybe the best thing for Doctor Who is to go away for a while. Then, when it returns, the appetite for new episodes will be at all-time high.

There just needs to be a concrete plan in place for the show to return, and from the moment it disappears. The last thing anyone wants is a repeat of ’89, when the original show went out with a whimper rather than a bang.

Doctor Who is not in serious trouble. It’s a massive international phenomenon, and makes so much money for BBC Worldwide that overnight ratings are almost irrelevant. But resting the show certainly couldn’t hurt. There’s nothing that makes us appreciate something like threatening to take it away.

News Source: Digital Spy