I don't think anyone would claim it was the 'bestest Doctor Who ratings evarrrr!'
The best Doctor Who ratings ever were (famously) for City of Death, Part 4 with 16.16m. In much the same way, the best ratings for EastEnders were in 1986. 30.15m. EastEnders these days regularly gets around 3.5m in overnights, and 5m consolidated.
But you don't see people wittering on about EastEnders viewing figures and the threat of imminent cancellation.
It's meaningless to compare past ratings with present ratings for any television show. Times have changed. Consumption patterns have changed. You can only compare present ratings with present ratings, which is what the chart the OP posted does. And from that chart, we can see that Doctor Who was the most watched scripted drama show in the UK on Christmas Day.
It's doing fine.
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[deleted]
4 months ago
Yeah even comparing shows that air same time of year in a year over year way has become problematic as things change so quickly, plus with Doctor Who and all the other shows like Call The MidWife, Eastenders etc., you can catch it when you want for free on BBC iPlayer.
So there's way different benchmarks to hit now, especially in anything BBC when they don't have to appease advertisers at all because they're advert free, biggest thing is the funding of it and proving it's worth the budget. Which of course is going to completely change in a couple more years with the BBC Licence Fee abolished and funding frozen in 2027: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jan/16/bbc-licence-fee-to-be-abolished-in-2027-and-funding-frozen they are going to have to work within a totally different funding model from the UK Government, it's why the BBC needed Disney on this one.
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