Doctor Who fans, or at least fans of old money Doctor Who, tend to have a greater understanding of the history of television than most people. There’s even an argument that archive television fandom as a whole, perhaps even archive television’s academia, are subsets of Doctor Who fandom. There’s certainly vast crossover on any plausible Venn diagram of the groupings, and it’s relatively easy to name the individuals prominent in non-Doctor Who archive telly circles who have no liking for or interest in the programme without having to pause for breath.

Nevertheless, as a group Doctor Who fandom can collectively be rather insular, or perhaps parochial is a better term, about certain topics. In terms of television ratings - the raw numbers of viewing people - we have a decades old tradition / failure of attributing rises and falls to something specific about the episode the rating for which we’re looking at. Or at best the one before it.¹ Rather than looking at wider and more structural causes, such as the time of year or the weather or what was on the other side at the time, and whether that was networked or not.

An oddity in Doctor Who’s ratings that’s always intrigued me is that The Power of Kroll (23 December 1978 - 13 January 1979) had a huge leap in ratings between Parts One and Two, near doubling the former’s 6.5m with the latter’s 12.4m. A friend of mine insists this is because everyone who saw Part One was so impressed by Tom Baker’s imitation playing of a reed pipe that they told all their friends to tune in and many of them did. They mean this in part as a parody of the normal fan explanations for these sort of things, but also on some level they think it’s true.