The overnight ratings are in for the fourth episode of Doctor Who season 14, 73 Yards, and it say the biggest number of viewers tuning in so far.
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According to figures from BARB (via DoctorWhoTV) the episode was watched during its BBC One transmission by 2.62m viewers, up on the current most-watched episode, the season premiere, Space Babies.
That episode was watched by 2.6m live, while 2.4m watched The Devil’s Chord and 2.04m watched Boom. Of course, it should be noted that all of these figures are only representative of the BBC One overnight audience.
This means they are unrepresentative of the overall viewing figures, particularly now that the show has switched to BBC iPlayer first release strategy. The full figures including iPlayer viewers over 7 days will be released in due course.
73 Yards was one of the show’s most mysterious episodes yet, with little revealed about its plot prior to transmission. Influenced by Welsh folk horror, it saw Ruby being followed by a woman who always stayed 73 yards away, after the Doctor disappeared.
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The season’s next episode, Dot and Bubble, has been described by showrunner Russell T Davies as “our clearest step into Black Mirror territory”, although he said “there’s a little bit more freedom and Doctor Who madness” in it.
He also explained that he previously pitched the episode to Steven Moffat for his era of the show, but that it was too expensive to make at the time.
Davies said: “I thought of it way back when, around 2009, when I was still working on Doctor Who, because I pitched it to Steven Moffat in a restaurant in Los Angeles. He was saying, ‘Would you come back and write for the programme?’ Every year, he’d ask me. How lovely.
“So I pitched this episode [in April 2010], in a restaurant called Hal’s on Abbot Kinney Boulevard. Karen Gillan [who played Amy Pond] was there. They were in LA to launch their first series, and I remember pitching – I used to call this – ‘visible Twitter’.
“We didn’t go very far with the conversation, because the idea was literally too expensive. But you wait 15 years and here we are.”
Doctor Who continues on Saturday 1st June on BBC iPlayer and BBC One. Previous seasons are available to stream on BBC iPlayer with episodes of the classic series also available on BritBox – you can sign up for a 7-day free trial here.
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