Doctor Who writer and actor Mark Gatiss says it's time to exterminate TV audience ratings

The Doctor Who writer and actor Mark Gatiss has called for an end to the tyranny of overnight television ratings, which he said are no more reliable than an opinion poll – yet can kill careers.

Saturday night ratings for the current BBC1 series of Doctor Who have slipped to a 10-year low. But Gatiss, who also co-created the BBC’s Sherlock, said the household panels used by audience monitor Barb were unrepresentative and failed to take into account the millions who watch online at a later date.

“These overnight figures are based on a system of 5,000 set-top boxes, which is essentially a Gallup poll and we all know how accurate they are,” Gatiss told Radio Times. “If they provided a thumbnail sketch of what people are watching, fine, but people’s careers and projects rise and fall with them. This is nuts. Everybody watches television in a different way from the way they did four, five years ago. Yet the people who make a fuss about overnights... go home and watch TV in [this] entirely different way.”

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The screenwriter and documentary maker added: “The ratings system is insane and iniquitous. I’ve seen grown men crying because their show got 6.3 million [viewers] instead of a hoped-for 6.5. They make a difference to a person’s career.”

Doctor Who hit a low of 3.87 million viewers for an episode last month, “The Zygon Inversion”, which was squeezed by The X Factor and World Cup Rugby on ITV. However Doctor Who viewing figures can rise by several million when consolidated figures, including those who watch via the iPlayer during the week, are taken into account.

Simon Cowell has also said the overnight ratings based on a household sample are “meaningless” – X Factor viewing figures fell below six million a fortnight ago whilst Strictly Come Dancing reached an audience of 10 million. The X Factor figure rose “two or three million” when time-shifted (eg +1 channels and recordings) as well as online viewing is added, the series creator claimed.

Barb said its viewing panel consisted of 5,100 households, each representing about 5,000 households across the UK, to give an accurate sample of viewing behaviour across the nation’s 26 million households. Its data is gathered from more than 10,000 set-top boxes.

Barb publishes “gold standard” ratings, collated from PVRs like Sky+ and other recording devices, calculated up to seven days after a programme has been broadcast.

Once a household has been recruited to the Barb panel, every TV set in the home is fitted with a meter. Software meters are also installed on laptop and desktop computers, and tablets.

Each member of the household over the age of four is assigned a button on a special remote control. If they enter a room while the television is on they must press their designated button to register their presence and press it again when they leave to show they are no longer watching.

Barb knows what panel members are watching through an audio matching process. The meters take an audio sample of the programme, which is then turned into a digital fingerprint and matched to a reference library of programmes. It takes 15 seconds for the audio to be recognised and therefore matched and Barb reports viewing on a minute-by-minute basis.

Data from Sky set-top boxes is accessed via information codes. Broadcasters have begun to embed metadata tags into online television content.

Panel data is sent back to Kantar Media at 2am before being processed and weighted to be representative of the whole of the UK. The “overnight” figures are then released to the industry at 9.30am each day. These figures include people who recorded a programme and watched it back the same day.

Consolidated ratings include catch-up, or time-shifted, viewing that happened up to seven days after the original broadcast. The consolidated ratings are the Barb “gold standard” on which the UK broadcasting and advertising industries rely for trading.