Muted finish for House and Doctor Who
There were a couple of quiet goodbyes on Sunday night with Doctor Who on ABC1 and House on Ten both finishing their runs with less than 1m viewers.
According to preliminary overnight metro ratings from OzTam, Doctor Who’s season finale pulled in 976,000 in the 7.30pm slot. And House, at 9.30pm, attracted an audience of 706,000, although that was the best in its timeslot.
Meanwhile, Masterchef won the night with nearly 1.9m viewers. However that was slightly behind its top ratings for the Sunday night slot – possibly because there was no elimination last night.
Ten’s digital sports channel One enjoyed a healthy average audience of 308,000 for the Formula One British Grand Prix – helped along by a winner for the Australian driver Mark Webber. This result was the best for a show on a secondary digital channel last night.
Sunday’s top 15 shows:
- Masterchef Ten 1.865m
- Seven News Seven 1.647m
- Nine News Nine 1.490m
- Dancing with the Stars Seven 1.287m
- RBT Nine 1.283m
- Send in the Dogs Nine 1.160m
- The Good Wife Ten 1.086m
- 60 Minutes Nine 0.996m
- Doctor Who ABC 0.976m
- Merlin Ten 0.930m
- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Nine 0.912m
- Bones Seven 0.910m
- ABC News ABC 0.859m
- Doctor Who: Confidential Cutdown ABC 0.732m
- House Ten 0.706m
Sunday’s channel share:
- Ten: 22.8%
- Seven: 22.6%
- Nine: 21.2%
- ABC1: 13.5%
- SBS1: 5.8%
- GO!: 4.8%
- One: 3.9%
- 7TWO: 3.7%
- ABC2: 0.9%
- ABC3: 0.4%
- SBS2: 0.4%
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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That’s Doctor Who’s second-best figures for the season and best ranking. Hardly muted. Excellent would be a better description.
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Have to agree. Great result for The Doctor, and notably he’s ahead of ABC News (!) and that ‘other’ doctor, House on 10.
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Ratings, while never an indication of quality (you just need to see more people watch “Send in the Dogs” than the ABC News and be horrified at the general mental capacity of the average Australian), are still useful on the level of pure numbers. And in the case of Doctor Who, it’s to show that nearly 1 in 20 people watched the Time Lord when, once upon a time, Doctor Who was tucked away in timeslots no one ever watched and was “for children”. So I’d call it a pretty stellar result for the Doctor, hardly a “muted” finish.
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I hope they don’t ruin it by sending it to a commercial station like they have a lot of other great BBC produced shows.
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Nah, Doctor Who is an ABC staple. They were happy to let the first season of Torchwood go to 10, but that’s about as close as it’ll get to the Doctor going to a commercial network for first-run material. Naturally, he gets a good showing on Pay TV, too.
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Man that was a good Doctor Who episode.
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They said the same thing about Top Gear and as soon as BBC Worldwide got a big offer from Nine they were happy to rat out SBS.
If one of the networks bid seriously for it, of course BBC Worldwide will sell it. Their job is to get maximum dollars for it.
What scares me even more would be the inevitable local spin-off edition. Gyton Grantley as The Doctor? No thanks…
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Unfortunately that’s the reality of it Master, money talks. They have targets like the rest of us.
They might loose a few loyal viewers in the process but stand to gain so many more new followers.
I download TopGear eps from iTunes now, 9 butchered it. I’ve never seen an ep of Dr Who in my life!
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The Master: surely an Aussie Dr Who spin-off would star one of the (many) Daddos as The Doctor, with some former soapster from Neighbours as his assistant.
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everyone went to bed early to get up for the soccer. real early if they missed the Doctor. If Ten bought it, it would be Matt Preston as the Doctor, with George as his assistant.
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Somehow Nine’s ‘RBT’ (tagline: “Yep, we’ve definitely run out of ideas this time”), which documents the heady drama and heightened tension of random breath-testing stations across NSW, somehow dragged in 1.3m viewers. Awful, awful stuff, Nine, I hope you only aired it out of contractual obligation.
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