“It’s the only chart that counts.”

When Doctor Who fans talk about “ratings”, that word is usually used to mean the same thing. The number of viewers, measured in hundreds of thousands, as approximated by BARB or its predecessor organisations. They (and by “they” I really mean “we”, who am I trying to kid) also largely only talk about Doctor Who’s ratings as a means of justifying or attempting to extinguish a deep rooted fan anxiety that the series might be taken away from us again. That “falling ratings” might lead to the series being cancelled and perhaps as soon as next week.

Now, this isn’t an article about that anxiety over a vanishingly unlikely possibility or anything like it. I want to say that before I say what I say next. Because it’s otherwise open to misinterpretation. Okay?

The most recent new episode of Doctor Who, at time of writing, was The Power of the Doctor. It was seen by 5.3m people in the UK on transmission and in the first seven days after. This is the same number of viewers as, to pick three examples from Doctor Who’s long history, Episode Four of The Evil of the Daleks (1967), Part Two of State of Decay (1980) and Part Two of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988). Now, by the logic often applied to television ratings, if any of these episodes is a success, they must all be, and if any are a failure then they must all be too, right?