Fifty years ago on Saturday the BBC aired a low-budget sci-fi drama aimed at families. Although overshadowed by JFK’s assassination the day before, the programme was viewed by 1.7 million people.
Titled “An Unearthly Child” it told the story of a time-traveller known as “The Doctor”. The programme captured the hearts and minds of children and adults alike, and with its ambition and humour became entrenched in British culture evermore.
Fast forward through 798 episodes, 11 regenerations, numerous “companions” (mostly female) and thousands of exploding Daleks and it brings us to the BBC’s 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.
The above shows the number of (UK) Twitter mentions per minute for Doctor Who during its run time (including an hour pre and post-air). Mentions spike around key plot moments (i.e. the return of David Tennant, Tom Baker’s appearance). The biggest spikes are from those tweeting at the start of the programme and then discussing the ending once it finished.
Looking at positive, neutral, and negative sentiment (auto-allocated by Sysomos) we can see that at the end of airing, Doctor Who left viewers with a generally positive feeling.
In the battle of the Doctors, David Tennant pips Matt Smith to the title of most (worldwide) mentioned Doctor on Twitter (recorded for all of Saturday). Special mention goes to Tom Baker who earned 32,572 mentions for his one-minute cameo.
Finally, the above word cloud shows what people were mentioning whilst Tweeting about the 50th Anniversary episode. The promoted hashtag “#savetheday” was extremely popular, as well as the title of the episode “DayoftheDoctor”. Other notable mentions include “Tom”, “Baker”, “Loved”, “Great”, and “Amazing”.
Putting the number of tweets into context, Doctor Who earned more mentions on Saturday than X Factor, I’m a Celebrity, and Strictly combined.
Here’s to another 50 years.
(For potential future Social Insight projects come and see Martin Slater or any of the A&I team).