QUICK UPDATE: For reference, the viewing figures for The Magician’s Apprentice, one week on, have come in at 7.33m. Furthermore, there have been 1.53m requests to view the programme on iPlayer. That’ll grow further over the coming weeks, and a firmer, final figure is due next month.

When David Tennant’s tenure in the TARDIS officially ended with The End Of Time Part 2, it was, it’s fair to say, a sizeable moment. On January 1st 2011, 10.4 million viewers were reported to have tuned in to see the episode as it screened, just over a third of all viewers watching TV at the time. The consolidated figures that arrived in February made even better reading: add in the BBC HD numbers, and the 1.3m iPlayer watchers, and The End Of Time Part 2 became only the third time that Doctor Who had been the most watched programme of the week on UK television, with 12.27 million viewers in total (according to BARB). There were DVD sales on top of that, too, as well as an international audience.

The End Of Time Part 2 was obviously the culmination of a storyline that had been building up for a good year, and the departure of Tennant – arguably the most popular Doctor of the modern era in terms of pure box office – was always going to be a big moment. But still: in an era when drama of any ilk struggles to top 10m viewers, it was the near-ratings peak of modern day Doctor Who.

Inevitably, the naysayers have been out in force given the early figures for Doctor Who series 9’s debut episode, The Magician’s Apprentice, over the weekend. The first ratings for the show suggested that 4.58 million people had tuned in to watch the programme as it broadcast on BBC One. That’s lower than the figure for any episode in series 8, and a good way down from Peter Capaldi’s debut, Deep Breath (which started with an overnight figure of 6.8m).