The Impossible Astronaut Ratings and Share - Updated

So Saturday saw the launch of the latest series of The Impossible Astronaut and overnight figures show that the episode enjoyed 6.52 million viewers in the UK, taking a 36.7% share.

Now this is down on previous years of the show, but despite what some areas of fandom would have you believe, the sky is far from falling in. 36.7% of the audience is nearly the same proportion as what The Eleventh Hour managed last year with its 8+m launch. What this indicates is that whilst the number of people watching as it aired was down, the percentage of the total viewing audience remained as strong as ever and hadnt just abandoned the show to watch something else.

When compared to the rest of its timeslot, the number of people watching TV across the whole board was significantly lower than this time last year. Doctor Who, whilst having a lower audience than perhaps expected, still managed to be the only show on any channel within its timeslot to get more than 2m viewers, so to get over six and a half million is great in the circumstances. It was the second most watched show of the night also.

What also needs to be remembered is that these are unnoficial overnights and we will have to wait nearly two weeks until we know the exact figure, which should see the figure rise by at least a million.

Now we are by no means trying to imply that these figures are perfect. It is still likely that TIA will end up being the lowest launch yet in terms of people watching as it airs, but when factors such as iPlayer are included it is likely that this episode will fall into line with other series and what we have come to expect.

And we got through all of that without once blaming the weather of the bank holiday weekend....

UPDATE!!! - The Appreciation Index for this weeks episode was released yesterday, and The Impossible Astronaut came off with an excellent score of 88. By comparison, only two episodes of series 5 scored 88 or higher, The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang. It would seem the majority of fans think that series 6 has got off to a brilliant start.