Take a look at Twitter or YouTube at the moment and you'll see lots of arguments about the ratings. I've written about this before - with Series 11 - and won't say much more on the matter, as both sides of the debate are right, and both sides are wrong. Those who say viewing figures are falling are perfectly right. Final figures (the +4-Screen ones, including all the various catch-up opportunities) show Spyfall Part 1 with 6.89 million, whilst Praxeus, the most recent episode with this figure, has 5.22 million. Only Fugitive of the Judoon has shown a slight increase on the previous week. The trend overall is downward. Overnight figures for the series to date started at 4.88 million, and last week's episode had 3.81 million.
Over in the USA, the only figures I've got are for overnights - Spyfall Part 1 launched with 0.79 million. Can You Hear Me? got 0.40 million watching, so almost half the viewership lost. Another significant figure as far as the US is concerned is the 18 - 49 demographic. 18 to 49 year-olds spend the most money, and this demographic is the one which the TV networks want to capture as it's the one which interests advertisers, merchandisers etc. Spyfall Part 1 had 0.19 million viewers in this age range, which has fallen to 0.10 million with Can You Hear Me?. Were Doctor Who to have been produced by a US network it would have been cancelled mid-season, let alone not picked up for a further series.
The counter argument to all this is always the percentages, or the placings in a week's or month's viewing tables. Doctor Who is still one of the most watched shows on British TV, getting just over 20% of the viewing public, and it remains in the top 30 shows for the month. The problem with this is that we are talking about reduced viewing for conventional television across the board. People are turning to streaming services, preferring to binge-watch box sets etc, or they're playing games instead of watching TV. It doesn't matter how big a percentage of the viewing public watches Doctor Who. A big percentage of a small number is still a small number. The 7th or 11th or 20th most watched programme of the night is a meaningless statistic, if hardly anyone is watching TV.
No matter what way you spin things, Doctor Who's viewing figures are going down. Hardly surprising for a re-booted programme that's been on the air for 12 series.
Of more interest to me - and of more concern to me - are the AI figures - the Audience Appreciation Index as was. You can argue about ratings until you are blue in the face. There is only ever one AI figure per episode, and it tells us how much viewers actually liked the thing. Sadly, this isn't good for the current iteration of the show at all.
The AI is a score out of 100. 91 or more is regarded as exceptional. 85 - 90 is excellent. Between 65 and 85 is good. Under 65 is considered poor.
The best we've had so far this series is an 83 for Fugitive of the Judoon. Both parts of Spyfall got 82. The worst to date, unsurprisingly, has been Orphan 55 with 77. The last two broadcast stories got 78, with the Tesla story getting 79.
Series 11 began with a score of 83, but had gone down to 79 by the series finale, with Resolution pushing it back up slightly to 80. The finale and The Tsuranga Conundrum were both on 79, whilst all the other stories were at 80 or 81.
This means that three of the current series episodes have fared worse than the lowest of the previous season - and we're only at Episode 7.
Going back to ratings for a moment, one of the things people argue is that they were falling under Moffat / Capaldi. As I've said, this can be debated. However, one thing which you cannot argue is that the stories have been better received since Series 11.
The lowest AI figure for Series 10 was an 81 for The Eaters of Light. World Enough And Time got an excellent 85.
The lowest AI figure for Series 9 was a 78 for Sleep No More. This was the only figure below 80, and four of the episodes had an 84.
The lowest AI figure for Series 8 was 82, for four episodes. Three episodes got an excellent 85.
Go back to Series 7 and ten of the episodes are 85 or above. In fact, Sleep No More is the only Moffat era story to go below 80 (and Russell T Davies never gave us anything that low), whilst Chibnall has so far managed to deliver six episodes in the 70's, out of eighteen broadcast to date, with not one considered excellent.
People need to stop this senseless bickering over ratings and concentrate on the AI figures.
Quality needs to count over quantity.
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