Timeless Children - Official Ratings

The conclusion to this year's series of Doctor Who, The Timeless Children, had an official rating of 4.69 million viewers, according to figures released by the Broadcasting Research Audience Board, BARB.

The figure is the lowest consolidated figure for an epiosde of Doctor Who since the series returned in 2005, a record previously held by the 2017 story, The Eaters of Light. Out of 861 episodes of Doctor Who broadcast since 1963, only 33 have achieved a lower rating.

To put the figue in perspective, it was still the 30th most-watched programme on British TV for the week, much higher that the position achieved by the majority of episodes of Doctor Who shown over the years. The episode had a 21.5% share of the total TV audience.

In detail 4.55 million watched the episode on a conventional TV set. An additional 70,000 watched on their PC, 39,000 watched on a Tablet device and 34,000 watched on a smartphone.

Top for the week was Ant and Dec's Saturday Takeaway on ITV with 7.41 million watching. The top BBC programme was the drama Death in Paradise with 6.78 million.

Doctor Who had an Appreciation Index score of 82

The average viweing figures for 2020 now stands at 5.40m as oposed to 7.96m for Series 11 in 2018. This is lower than Series 10 which averaged 5.64m. It is still higher than the lowest rated season, season 26 which averaged 4.31m .