Things the Daily Mirror got Wrong

Yesterday British "newspaper" the Daily Mirror published an article about Doctor Who with the headline"Doctor Who to go back in time as BBC ditches 'edgy' adult plots following ratings slump". The article can barely be called journalism at all and as such I thought it would be highly amusing to point out everything they got wrong.

It opens with the promo image for Series 8 with the following caption below it:

It is ridiculous that a professional newspaper can not spot such a silly mistake, unless of course it was intentional. Twitter user @ellardent speculated that "It's a new villain. A mad chemist fused himself with Tumblr" whilst @NicklebyWelks said "'Chemistr' is actually a rarely used abbreviation... ChemistRANIvoratrelundar".

The article then says some fans want changes and some want Steven Moffat to be sacked. This is perhaps the one thing the article has got right. There isn't really anything to make a story here though as you could find similar comments on the internet during any series of Doctor Who, and there's plenty of fans writing about how much they have enjoyed the series.

Next we have a quote from a "senior BBC source". There's also 'quotes' from "another insider" and "one [fan]". As any good historian knows, it is difficult to trust how reliable a source is when the actual source isn't revealed. Maybe someone did say these things, who am I to distrust? But actually it looks suspiciously like these quotes were simply made up. The irony is that it would be pretty easy to go on Twitter or a Doctor Who forum and find some genuine negative quotes from fans, but it looks like they couldn't even be bothered do to this.

The article then goes on to talk about ratings with the following paragraph:

 

Now that final part about Eccleston's debut is obviously irrelevant- of course it was going to have a huge audience when it was revived and the ratings were nowhere near as high for the rest of the series. Only one of the episodes of Series 8 actually had between six and seven million viewers (In the Forest of the Night with final ratings of 6.92m) with the rest being over 7 million and Deep Breath having 9.17 million viewers. They are pretty impressive figures anyway but when you consider that these figures only include people who watched on the night in the UK you realise how high they are- they don't include repeats, iPlayer viewings or the millions who watched acrosse the world. 

So Series 7 had 8 million viewers did it? I think that's what that sentence is supposed to mean, although with that grammar it is difficult to be certain. Well only three of the Series 7 episodes had over 8 million viewers and only one of those was in 2013. It is difficult to average out the number of viewers across a series but the numbers are probably very similar between series 7 and 8. The BBC even declared series 8 a "ratings success", although the Mirror seems to have forgotten about this.

I end with my favorite part of the article, this bit: 

The lack of chemistry thing does seem odd- from what I have seen on the internet most fans seems to like the chemistry between Capaldi and Coleman. The amusing part here though is the fans calling for the return of the Daleks and Cybermen. I had to read this several times because I was a little confused. Did I somehow watch a different series to these fans? Or have the Mirror made up this fact too? The daleks appeared in the second episode of the series, titled Into the Dalek (no question that there were daleks in that!) and the cybermen appeared in both episodes of the two part finale, Death in Heaven/Dark Water. 3 of the 12 episodes of the series had either daleks or cybermen in them- that's a quarter of the episodes! It's just nonsense.

In summary, ignore this article. It's badly researched, full of errors and gives absolutely no clues to what is going on in the production of series 9. It's pure click-bait, which is why I haven't even linked to the article.