Those who follow my work here at GAMbIT and around the web will know that I’m a pretty big fan of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor in the current series of Doctor Who. I for one am looking forward to seeing more of him in the upcoming Christmas special as well as the upcoming series 9, which he has been confirmed to be in. But I’m not the only one going nuts over Capaldi, the BBC has recently announced that the numbers for series 8 have been the highest the show has seen in a while.
The BBC press release states:
Series 8 saw Peter Capaldi take up the iconic role of The Doctor, with an average consolidated audience of 7.4m viewers every week in the UK.
This an increase of 39% on the overnight figures reported the day after broadcast. This includes the 9.2m average audience that watched Deep Breath, Peter Capaldi’s debut episode, which is the highest figure for a non-special episode (Christmas/50th anniversary) since the opening episode of series 5 (Matt Smith’s debut) in 2010. These figures show how Doctor Who has consistently achieved big audiences across the last three series – series 7a/7b combined had an average consolidated audience of 7.4m, series 6a/6b attracted 7.5m and series 5 was viewed by 7.3m.
There has been over 18.9m requests to watch Doctor Who series 8 on BBC iPlayer – an average of 1.6m requests for each of the 12 episodes.
In the US, consolidated figures for the first 10 episodes have seen Series 8 experience a 23% uplift in total audience in Live+7 on Series 7. The series 8 premiere was the show’s highest-rated series premiere ever on BBC America, and is the first BBC Worldwide series ever to simultaneously hold the #1 slot in the Main TV Season Charts across all major Electronic Sell-through platforms in the US within 48 hours of episode 1’s release on August 24th 2014. In Canada, on the Space channel, the first 10 episodes of Series 8 have seen a 22% uplift in consolidated audience size on Series 7.
Steven Moffat, lead writer and executive producer said: “We never take it for granted, but the miracle has happened again – the nation has taken a brand new Doctor to its heart.”
Danny Cohen, Director of BBC Television added: “It’s been an outstanding debut series for Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who and I’m very grateful to Peter, Steven Moffat and everyone involved.”
Doctor Who Extra, which offers viewers a behind the scenes look at making one of the nation’s best loved dramas has had 1.3m BBC iPlayer requests and reached 2.4m people on BBC Red Button to date.
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