Doctor Who returns: Can Peter Capaldi command record viewers in series 8?
It's back. At 7:50pm tonight, Doctor Who returns to our screens, albeit in a brand new guise.
Well over a year after the 12th Doctor was revealed to be Peter Capaldi, Whovians will finally get their first real taste of the new man after being teased with a snippet at the end of the Day of the Doctor special last November.
Season premieres have always been a big event for the programme. Tonight's episode, titled Deep Breath, will aim to top Destiny of the Daleks, the season 17 premiere which drew in 13.5m viewers – a Doctor Who record.
Despite the huge audience who tuned into watch the episode on 1 September 1979, Destiny of the Daleks has not been remembered as a classic by Doctor Who fans. Last summer, a poll conducted by Doctor Who Online saw fans rank the episode in 61st place out of 239.
Yet the success of Destiny of the Daleks shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. After all, it did star Tom Baker, the most popular Doctor in the programme's long history – according to audience figures.
Episodes starring Baker, who played the fourth doctor, had an average audience of 9.4m viewers.
The above graph also reveals that it was the earliest Doctors who have captivated the largest audiences. Four of the five first actors to play Doctor Who had the four largest average audiences (first Doctor William Hartnell, third John Pertwee, fourth Baker and fifth Peter Davison).
After the show's popularity declined in the eighties – when Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy inhabited the role – fans endured a 16 year absence until its return in 2005 with ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston. David Tennant is the most popular Doctor of the "modern era", although Tennant, Eccleston and Capaldi's predecessor Matt Smith has had between 7 – 8m viewers.
A sign of Tom Baker's popularity in the role can be seen in the fact his six-year stint in the role was the longest in Doctor Who's history. Four of the five most popular seasons in Doctor Who history featured Baker in the role, the most popular being Season 17 – which started with Destiny of the Daleks.
In an interview with the Guardian, Capaldi admitted he was wary of the level of exposure the role would bring.
He said:
I had to think carefully about the level of visibility. My life was blessed, but as soon as this happened I had paparazzi outside my house. People spoke to me before and recognised me, but nothing like this.
I had to decide if I was ready to live with that, because once that genie is out of the bottle, it doesn't go back in.
When you consider that even the least popular season of the programme had over 3m average viewers, even it tonight's episode is a relative failure, the genie will be well and truly out of the bottle.