Doctor Who Ratings, Part 1: 1963-1989 & 1996

Only a day after the assassination of American president John F. Kennedy, the BBC introduced the British television-watching audience to its new science-fiction series ‘Doctor Who’. Who knew that sixty years later, ‘Doctor Who’ would still be gracing our screens – more or less.

As this video was written and produced before the 60th anniversary trio of ‘Doctor Who’ specials, it does not include the numbers for those episodes. Here, we are covering 1963 to 2022. I say this not for those who are watching this video immediately, but for those who may watch it long afterwards.

In this, Part 1 of our two-part exploration of ‘Doctor Who’ ratings, we will tour the ratings for the classic era of ‘Doctor Who’, and we will take a moment to countdown the lowest rated stories from both classic and new Who.

In Part 2, we will continue our tour with the ratings for the new run of the series, and then countdown the highest rated stories. Then finally, for the sheer fun it, we have a chart rating the individual doctors based purely on their television ratings. There maybe some controversy.

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From 1963 to 1989, the format of ‘Doctor Who’ was based on the serial – three, four, or six 24-minute episodes, except during the Six Doctor’s tenure, where 45-minute long episodes were not uncommon. The result of this serial format is a classic series of almost seven hundred episodes. For obvious reasons, I have chosen to present each serial’s ratings as an average of the individual episodes making up that serial story. So, let’s get down to it.

The First Doctor’s tenure, and we begin with the first ever ‘Doctor Who’ serial, ‘100,000 BC’, with 5.9 million viewers. The first episode was titled ‘An Unearthly Child’, which is why the serial as a whole is often referred to by that name.

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