Alleviating speculation about the broadcast time for "The Impossible Astronaut", the Radio Times—full Doctor Who scans here—has confirmed when on April 23rd the sixth series begins. At 6:00 P.M. on BBC One and BBC HD, "The Impossible Astronaut" airs, a particularly early time slot for a series that will be increasingly dark.
As the Doctor Who News Page explains, the earliest time slot for Series 5 was "The Vampires of Venice" at 6:30. This time slot is likely a product of the subsequent programme, So You Think You Can Dance, which begins at 6:45 and ends at 8:00. "The Impossible Astronaut" is also sandwiched behind the new game show Don't Scare the Hare.
[This episode of So You Think You Can Dance] is the fifth in the series, which last week achieved 3.4 million viewers in its 6.30 timeslot.
ITV1 will be showing March of the Dinosaurs, a Feature-length CGI adventure from the makers of Walking with Dinosaurs, telling the story of an epic migration undertaken by a herd of dinosaurs in the high arctic 70 million years ago.
BBC Two has the 1964 Beatles film, A Hard Day's Night, Channel 4 is showing Come Dine with Me and Channel Five the 1959 film Ben Hur.
The direct consequence of this time slot is the inevitable placement of Doctor Who Confidential, airing on BBC Three, which—as many international readers may be unaware—only starts its programming at 7:00 every night. A whole fifteen minutes without Doctor Who! Can we survive it? Confidential might not; the News Page adds that the last gap between the parent series and its behind-the-scenes feature resulted in a 40% drop in ratings.
Will an earlier time slot lower or raise the ratings for "The Impossible Astronaut"? As always, we'll have the episode for free, international streaming for the benefit of those who can't get it in their home country.
1 Comments:
Hold on. A couple of points:
1. Vampires of Venice aired a 5:59, not 6:30
2. According to the RT website BBC2 has Flog It and Dad's Army. Not A Hard Day's Night
On the issue of what it will do with viewers, it will probably reduce, just because if you look at the ratings for both Merlin and Doctor Who, on average, every hour earlier lost about 750,000 viewers (if I recall correctly, I don;t have the figures I did to hand).
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