Not in Britain, no.

I agree and hope it stays that way. And although it's cheaper to make than it could be, other programs that rate better are even cheaper. I hope you're all right and merchandising/DVD sales will keep it strong but never underestimate the power of the scheduling department, no matter how stupid they seem.

Yes. The BBC are hardly going to panic while the overnights alone are higher than most weekday prime time shows get in total, while being shown at 6.20 pm on a Saturday. Nor will they only look at the rough overnights - they will look at the hundreds of thousands that are watching on iPlayer (yes - Doctor Who really is getting that many downloads/streamings), the very high BBC Three figures, the better than ever AI figures and the massive timeshifts.

Seriously - if you think that is going to concern the BBC, I'd hate to think how you feel they responds to the many dramas that get recommissioned on ratings of less than 6 million total.


Don't ask me - I never use ignore, always seems like a cop out designed to avoid reading things that contradict how we want things to be.

Can you name one?

Doctor Who is on the same rate as 'Waking the Dead' c. £700,000 per hour. So are 'Hustle', 'Ashes to Ashes', 'Spooks', 'Hotel Babylon', 'Waterloo Road' etc. It's a bit of a myth that Doctor Who costs more than other dramas, but it certainly sells better, and brings in more money from merchandise, while getting better weekly ratings (or, indeed, overnights) than other BBC dramas.

The schedulers have no say in neither commissions nor budgets. They just tootle around in their own little bubble, safe from the concerns of the real world.

Thanks for that info, Dr Thete. I was under the impression it cost £1m+ per episode - although even if it did it must make that back in sales etc.

do you mind if I ask how do you know this?

Not at all.

A while back, in response to newspaper claims of £1 million pounds per episode budgets for Doctor Who, RTD pointed out that they get the same budget per episode as 'Waking the Dead'

Someone at the BBC (trustworthy fan source) indicated that 'Waking the Dead' cost £700,000 per hour.

The BBC Commissioning guidelines indicate that the range for series drama is £650 - 800,000 per hour:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/t...ail.shtml#bbc1

A source at a production company indicated that guidance given to them said that 'Hustle', 'Ashes to Ashes', 'Spooks' and 'Hotel Babylon' cost about the same and are 'somewhere in the middle' of the commissioning tariffs. Though they didn't give an actual figure, it seems fair to assume that they are all around the £700,000 mark that 'Waking the Dead' and 'Doctor Who' are on.

The same source indicated that costume dramas are usually at the high end of the tariff.

I am simply assuming that 'Ashes to Ashes' shares the budget of its predecessor, and that 'Waterloo Road' will be on pretty much the same too. I think both are fair assumptions. Even if I'm wrong about that, my c. £700,000 is a reasonable figure to use - as it is in the middle of the £150,000 commissioning range.

How many of those soaps and gameshows sell around the world and will continue to generate income for the BBC decades after they're made?

thanks for the info. will do some research too.

Not questioning the veracity of what you say, but I'd have expected the outlay required to produce an episode of Who to dwarf that of regular dramas.

But then, I suppose the lion's share of the cash goes to paying the folks involved in the production of the show. So, if an expert consultant in period drama is charging the same amount as an SFX wizard, then maybe the overall costs will be fairly similar to one another,

Regards,

Cypher

This is why they have to be so careful with things like CGI, only able to afford a brief shots of the werewolf in 'Tooth and Claw' for example, and depend on a certain amount of prestige value and goodwill from people like The Mill. It's also why they depend so much on filming inside pre-existing interiors and don't tend to construct their own - e.g. the engine room in '42'. RTD and Collinson have remarked in the past that they somehow manage to do all that Doctor Who does on the budget that much more limited and fixed shows have.


Costume costs will probably be higher for a period drama than for most Doctor Who (which goes into the past, but also has a fair few present day episodes). There is also the need to hire period locations, the need to dress those locations and, indeed, use CGI to help do that.

Doctor Who can get away with broad brushstrokes and slight of hand when dealing with the past where full-blown period dramas need to give detail. Doctor Who also tends to have fewer main cast than the often large casts of period dramas.

There may be more to it than that, but those would be my best guesses as to why period drama is more expensive.

The key point is, however, that the budget for Doctor Who isn't larger than usual. That most of the time the audience don't notice is a testament to the skills of those involved.

Eastenders (£500,000/hour) rates better but costs less. I wasn't only referring to Category 4 or 5 drama and I apologize for not being specific. Also, I think Who's family slot is more vulnerable than a 9pm drama to cheap soaps, light-entertainment studio shows and simple reality-type stuff.

Hee! True, yet they can still kill a show with their decisions and I don't believe they do anything on a whim.

That's what I'm counting on for Who to survive any major dip in the ratings. Those DVD sets must be raking it in!

On that basis - why would the BBC make anything other than Eastenders? There really is nothing to worry about here. That Eastenders is cheaper and gets better ratings will have zero impact on the commissioning of other dramas. Just as it hasn't for the past however many years.


Why? Putting to one side that fact that Doctor Who has consistently done better than any of the BBC's LE shows on Saturday, and usually beats the BBC's soap-like Casualty, the very reason Doctor Who was brought back was to add to the BBC's schedule, to be something other than a soap or LE programme. That's why the success of Who has led to 'Robin Hood' and 'Merlin' and 'Primeval' on ITV.


Occam's Razor. The schedulers put Doctor Who on at 6.20 because they believed it would work and give a strong start to the evening. That strategy appears to have paid off - with ratings in a 6.20 Saturday slot that dramas in weekday primetime slots struggle to get. That, along with high BBC Three, timeshift and iPlayer figures really does equal success.

Certainly there is absolutely no way that anyone at the BBC is trying to actively harm the show.


The very lowest weekly reach the show has had since returning in 2005 was 7.06 million in series two (that was with an initial overnight of just 5.5 million). The lowest final share has been 33%. Doctor Who can easily afford to drop to 25% and a weekly reach of just 6 million before anyone at the BBC will even come close to worrying.

So far the weekly totals for this series are:
[LIST][*]PiC - 11.28 million[*]FoP - 10.50 million (final ratings for second BBC Three showing not available yet)[*]PotO - 8.40 million (overnights only - likely to be over 9.5 million on final figures).[*]TSS - 7.27 million (overnights only - no figures for Friday repeats - likely to be over 9 million on final figures).[/LIST]
That's without adding in the literally hundreds of thousands who have watched them via iPlayer.

So we are way off the point of worrying. Not least when we consider than only four out of thirteen series three episodes got a weekly reach of over 9 million - and series four looks set to hit that mark after just its four initial episodes.

Update:
FoP additional second BBC3 viewing not in top 10 (so less than 600k. - I wish they wouldn't include 60 Secs!)

PotO gets an official total of 8.80m (without second showing on BBC3).

So a drop from the first two weeks. It would be good to get some feeling for iPlayer viewing though, to complete the picture...

K

The total for 'Planet of the Ood', including the final BBC One, final Sunday BBC Three ratings and Friday BBC overnight figure is:

9.31 million

Not far off my 9.5 million guess then. We may not get a final figure for the Friday but I would imagine that the final total would hit c. 9.4 million.

I'm not here to say DW is performing badly (in objective terms it's getting 6.5m-7m at the time of year when that is respectable) but I don't think you can just add BBC3 and BBC1 ratings unless you have good reason to believe there isn't repeated viewing. There may well be some overlap.

There is but it's only about 5% according to BARB.

I'm sure the soap viewing figures add in the BBC3/ITV2 repeats - they certainly have always added in the omnibus figures.

Where do they say that?

They used to then they changed it to the premiere broadcast only.

According to the BBC, based on detailed BARB results, c.95% of viewers of BBC Three repeats are new viewers (the same applies for 'Spooks' and 'Eastenders' etc.).

That would make adjusted figures (to date) of (circa):

PiC - 11.17 million
FoP - 10.43 million
PotO - 9.22 million
TSS - 7.23 million

Obviously the last two are still awaiting some final figures. TSS should break 9 million (adjusted). It seems we can also add a few hundred thousand iPlayer figures to each of those (sorry I can't really post the actual figures here).

Only four of the series three episodes broke 9 million (adjusted). One was boosted by football (meaning a higher available audience) and the other three were the opening story and the final two - which benefited from the obvious hype. That it looks very possible that the opening four of this series will do it, despite piss poor timeslots, that's pretty impressive.

Ok...my next question would be: so what? Shouldn't you compare these figures to other shows that are repeated (and accumulate the figures)?

At the end of the day the BBC will respond to how the premiere is affected. Any major drop in that will probably see a major drop for BBC3 figures too. But as the figures are still above the minimum DW has received in the last three years then there is little to worry about.

We can, and Doctor Who does very well in such a comparison, but comparing the figures isn't really the point.

It's about showing how well the series *really* does, in and of itself, as compared to the impression given by the overnights and timeshifted figures (though, of course, the overnight BBC One figures alone would make for a runaway success for any show).


Exactly. When the base figure is c. 7 million, then Doctor Who really is still giving a remarkable performance. That's before we consider the rather wonderful fact that c. half the UK population (c. 30 million) watch at Doctor Who at some point in the series.

Most other BBC drama’s (especially soap’s) do not have the merchandising and overseas sales of Doctor Who. In fact I read that Doctor Who is worth £100 million per year to the BBC. Even allowing for media exaggeration it is a lot of money.

Actual viewing figures don’t really mean very much to The BBC (as long as they don’t go too low) as they don’t get any of there revenue from advertising.

It does matter in terms of whether they are satisfying their remit to produce popular family entertainment. If DW started getting 3m viewers they would have to seriously rethink the format.

But at the moment things are very good.