Final ratings data for the week ending 30th September 2012 released by the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, or BARB, gives Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan a final rating of 7.82 million viewers.

Doctor Who was the thirteenth most-watched programme of the week on British television and the fifth highest rated on BBC One, the same positions as the previous week.

The final rating includes all those who record the programme and watch it within a week. It does not include the BBC Three repeat, where around 300,000 watched. Nor does it include those watching on iPlayer where over 1 million people have accessed the episode so far.

The average rating for 2012 is now 7.96 million, higher than the figure for last year, with the Christmas episode still to be included.

Doctor Who could make it on to the cover of the prestigious and long-running American weekly listings publication TV Guide for the first time.

The programme is among the 10 nominated shows for the magazine's third annual Fan Favorites Cover Poll, and whichever programme wins will feature on the cover of the edition for the week starting Monday 10th December.

Polling ends on Sunday 28th October at midnight Pacific Time, and people can vote as often as they want to, although they have to "Like" the publication on Facebook first.

The other programmes nominated by TV Guide are: Fringe, Grimm, Happy Endings, Parks And Recreation, Pretty Little Liars, Scandal, Spartacus, The Vampire Diaries, and The Walking Dead.

Votes can be cast via this link.

TV Guide was first published on 3rd April 1953 and currently has a total paid, verified, and analysed non-paid circulation average of 2,010,879 copies a week.

The third and final part of the fan reimagining of Power Of The Daleks has been released online.

The film is an adaptation of the Second Doctor's debut adventure, which has been reworked and directed by Nick Scovell, who stars as the Doctor in this version. Also in the cast are Nicholas Briggs, Lisa Bowerman, and Barnaby Edwards.


As previously reported, the film will be shown in full and in high definition at the Doctor Who Appreciation Society's Riverside Reflections convention in London on Sunday 21st October, where it is now hoped the man behind the iconic Dalek design, Raymond Cusick, will join the original director of Power of the Daleks - Christopher Barry - and actress Anneke Wills, who played companion Polly in the TV version, among the guests.

The film has been made by the people behind the acclaimed Portsmouth stage productions of The Web of Fear, Fury From The Deep, The Evil of the Daleks, and The Dalek Masterplan (the latter having been renamed from the original 12-parter).

The Angels Take Manhattan has averaged 552,000 viewers in the five major Australian capital cities. It was the top-rating ABC drama of the day and the tenth-highest-rating programme of the day overall. These figures do not include regional and rural viewers, time-shifted viewers, and iView downloads.

Extra dates have been added to the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular taking place this December at the Sydney Opera House.

The show now runs from Saturday 15th December until the following Wednesday 19th December and will feature music from the TV series composed by Murray Gold.

The show will be presented by special guests Alex Kingston (“River Song”) and Mark Williams (“Brian Williams”) with music performed by The Metropolitan Orchestra, conducted by Ben Foster.

Full details and how to book can be found via the Sydney Opera House website.

Doctor Who dominated the listings for the BBC iPlayer for September, with over 8 million accessing the programme at some point during the month.

Top of the list was the series opener, which has been available for almost the entire month, Asylum of the Daleks with over 2.2 million requests. It was by far the most requested programme on the iPlayer for September.

The next three episodes, available for fewer days, took the next three places in the chart, with Dinosaurs on a Spaceship having 1.8 million requests, A Town Called Mercy having 1.4 million requests and The Power Of Three having 1.3 million accessing the episode.

The highest-rated non-Doctor Who programme was Citizen Khan, which had less than half of the requests for Asylum of the Daleks with just over 1.0 million accessing the programme.

The last Doctor Who episode before the mid-series break, The Angels Take Manhattan, was 7th in the list, with 0.92 million requests, despite only being available for the last 28 hours of the month.

Asylum of the Daleks currently stands as the fifth-most-accessed programme of the year. All Doctor Who episodes are available on the BBC iPlayer until later this evening.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the first sole credited single release by The Beatles - who would feature in Doctor Who in stock footage in The Executioners (episode 1 of The Chase) - and if he had a time machine Matt Smith would love to see the Fab Four: "I'd go see music - the Beatles at their height, or Woodstock, or Kurt Cobain live. I'd love to see Arcade Fire in a room somewhere. And Sinatra when he was with Dean Martin." [Bust Magazine via Yahoo, 2 Oct 2012] (DWN note: Perhaps Matt got his time trip after all, if this photo that was circulated earlier in the year is to be believed!)

Alex Kingston is to appear in the 10th season of NCIS as a "woman of questionable morals". The actress is to play a character named Miranda Pennebaker, and is described by series boss Gary Glasberg as someone who "deals in everything from high-end weapons sales to priceless gems. Her connections go all the way up the ladder of D.C. politics, and [Major Case Response Team leader Supervisory Special Agent Leroy Jethro] Gibbs needs her for this very disturbing, emotional case." [TVLine, 3 Oct 2012]

Author and long-term fan A. L. Kennedy has expressed an interest to write for Doctor Who: "To go back to things that you are completely open to as a child, and which you allow to be very deeply part of who you are, as an artist, is to get back to that bit of yourself. And Doctor Who is very deeply there in my own work. Every crazy person, lots of the sense of humour, my viewpoint on what human beings are, absolutely. If I wasn’t going to be a writer I was going to be an anthropologist, because that was my thing: what are human beings?" The author will also be talking about Doctor Who when she appears at the Wigtown Book Festival on Sunday 7th October. [Scotsman, 1 Oct 2012]

A rare opportunity to see Sarah Sutton in one of her earliest TV roles is coming up. The BFI is screening the BBC's 1973 adaptation of Alice Through The Looking Glass, which stars Sutton as the eponymous heroine, at its Southbank venue in London on Saturday 17th November as part of its Beyond the Fourth Wall – Experiments in TV Drama season. Directed by James MacTaggart, who was keen to exploit the possibilities offered by the then-new technique of colour separation overlay, the 65-minute play was the BBC's official entry to the Prix Italia competition. Also appearing in it are Geoffrey Bayldon (White Knight), Bruce Purchase (Walrus), and Stephen Moore (Haigha). Tickets go on sale to the public on Tuesday 9th October.

Mark Gatiss will be at the BFI Southbank on Sunday 28th October for a question-and-answer session following a preview of his feature-length BBC Four documentary Horror Europa With Mark Gatiss, which explores European horror cinema and is a follow-up to his BBC Four series A History of Horror. Again, tickets go on sale to the public on Tuesday 9th October. The 90-minute documentary will air on BBC Four towards the end of October.

Billie Piper is moving to Los Angeles with husband Laurence Fox after they both finish their current theatre stints, according to a newspaper interview with Fox, who is appearing with Arthur Darvill in Our Boys at The Duchess Theatre in London until Saturday 15th December. Piper is in The Effect at The Cottesloe, which opens on Tuesday 6th November and runs until Wednesday 23rd January 2013, meaning that for a few weeks their performances will overlap. However, Fox said the two of them didn't compete over their careers. "It's not competitive but I feel like I've got to raise my game a bit. She's really good so it would be nice if I was really good too," he said. [i, 3 Oct 2012]

Meanwhile, Matt Smith and David Tennant bumped into each other at the press night for Our Boys. Also there was Billie Piper to give her support to her husband. [Mail Online, 4 Oct 2012]

Comedian and TV presenter Frank Skinner has told of his failed bid to secure a role in the current series of Doctor Who. In an interview with Absolute Radio, he said: "I got my manager to phone up the Doctor Who people when I heard this series was being filmed. He never mentioned it again so I take it that he couldn't break it to me." [i, 3 Oct 2012]

Comic book writer and playwright Grant Morrison, who penned stories for Doctor Who Magazine in the 1980s, told the MorrisonCon audience in Las Vegas that despite his desire to write for the show and apparent initial interest by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss in him doing so, nothing more had been forthcoming. "Moffat had been getting a lot of tweets from people who were saying, 'You should have Grant write Doctor Who', and I'd really love to write Doctor Who," he said. He added that a friend who had worked with Moffat and Gatiss suggested it to the pair and told him the duo wanted to hear from him. "We tried it four or five times, and he never wrote back," said Morrison. [Comic Book Resources, 1 Oct 2012 - NB: Article contains strong language elsewhere.]

In a two-page feature in the new Radio Times, Steven Moffat describes how he struggled to find the proper ending for Amy and Rory. "How and why would they leave? And would they live or die? I wrote and rewrote. I had a completely different ending and threw it away. So many times over those mad few days, the fate of the Ponds changed. Alive, dead, alive, dead . . . Nothing felt right. Nothing felt inevitable." [Radio Times, 3 Oct 2012]

Sheridan Smith - companion Lucie Miller to the Eighth Doctor in the Big Finish audio dramas - is the latest signing to BBC In-House Comedy's production of Mr Stink. As previously reported, the children's novel by David Walliams stars Hugh Bonneville as the eponymous tramp and has been adapted by Walliams and Simon Nye. Smith, who will play the overbearing mother of lonely 12-year-old Chloe who befriends Mr Stink, said: "David is such a brilliant writer, and the character just jumped off the page when I read it." [BBC Media Centre, 4 Oct 2012]

An Australian politician has started a campaign for Doctor Who to film an episode in Australia.  Federal Nationals Party MP George Christensen has launched a campaign to bring the program to Australia in 2015 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who's first Australian screening in 1965. The Queensland-based MP wants the program filmed in his coastal electorate and suggests that bringing the show down under could help stimulate Australia's film and tourism industry.

"As an avid Doctor Who fan, I would love to see the TARDIS materialise in Australia and, most importantly, it would be a tremendous boost to tourism in Bowen and the Whitsundays, as well as to the local economy," Mr Christensen said.

In a letter to Steven Moffat, he said Doctor Who was inextricably linked to Australia because the very first episode, An Unearthly Child, was written by Australian Anthony Coburn. He also pointed out that two of the Doctor's former companions, Tegan Jovanka and Jo Grant, were played by Australians Janet Fielding and Katy Manning (born in the UK, but later an Australian citizen).

Mr Christensen has started an online petition, as well as establishing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube campaigns.

... so asks Mike Rugnetta on the latest episode of Idea Channel, the weekly web programme from PBS Digital Studios.

A range of Doctor Who homeware products has been launched by BBC Worldwide.

Called Doctor Who Home and created by design partner Skew & Rude, it has Daleks, Cybermen, and the TARDIS emblazoned on a total of 14 products, including jugs, mugs, cups, teapots, cards, notepads, and gift wrap, as well as textiles and kitchen accessories. They will be available in shops from the end of next month.

David Wilson-Nunn, the creative director of BBC Worldwide, led the appointment to exploit a perceived gap in the market for 16-to-60-year-old fans, having previously worked with Skew & Rude on strategic work for the programme. He said the TARDIS graphic, which is featured on boxed card packaging, was "like a secondary brand logo for us – the one thing that never changes and something we can use across everything".

Abi Williams, the founder and director of Skew & Rude, said the designs had been created by "vectorising images and then developing block colour work and playing with shapes across product ranges". She added: "We're working on the next season to follow this collection. We want to push the design as far as possible and have two fantastic concepts for a product brand."