The Beast Below was watched by 6.7 million viewers, according to unofficial overnight figures.

The programme had an audience of 6.4 million on BBC One, with an additional 330,000 watching on BBC HD. The programme's share was 34%. Although a drop on the previous week, the programme was still the most watched of the day, beating the second-placed National Lottery by 0.8 million viewers. It is very rare for a programme placed so early in the evening to top the ratings for the day, especially on what was, wether-wise, one of the Saturdays of the year so far in the UK.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix performed the best for ITV1, with 5.7 million watching the network premiere. The FA Cup had an average of 3.3 million viewers, with a peak of 4.9 million against Doctor Who.

The highest peak of the day was between 4.15pm and 4.30pm when 7.6 million watched the Grand National horse race on BBC One.

Overall, the programme currently stands as the twelfth most-watched of the week, with Sunday's ratings still to come. A top ten place is still a possibility once the final ratings are calculated next week.

On BBC Three, Doctor Who Confidential was watched by 0.56 million viewers, a 2.7% share of the audience.

Two alumni of the classic series of Doctor Who have recently died.

Hubert Rees had three roles in the series working with two different Doctors.

He first appeared in the 1968 story Fury from the Deep, working alongside Patrick Troughton. He played the Chief Engineer, the head of engineering at a Euro Sea Gas refinery who assisted the Doctor in his efforts to defeat the Weed Creature. Rees returned to the series the following year in Troughton's swan song, The War Games, in which he played Captain Ransom, an officer in the British Army. His final appearance was in the 1976 Tom Baker story The Seeds of Doom, playing John Stevenson, a botanist at a scientific expedition in Antarctic.

Outside of Doctor Who he had roles in many well-known dramas, including Paul Temple, The Sweeney, The Duchess of Duke Street, By the Sword Divided and Howards' Way.


Max Faulkner, born in 1931, was a stunt man and actor who has small roles in six Doctor Who stories. He played a UNIT soldier in the 1970 Jon Pertwee story The Ambassadors of Death, and a miner in the 1974 story The Monster of Peladon. In Jon Pertwee's final story, Planet of the Spiders, he played the Guard Captain.

Faulkner appeared with Tom Baker in three stories. In the 1975 story Genesis of the Daleks he played a Thal Guard before returning later in the year in The Android Invasion as Corporal Adams, a UNIT officer stationed at Devesham. His final appearance in 1978 was in The Invasion of Time where he played Nesbin, the leader of a group of Outsiders.

He was the fight arranger in the 1976 story The Hand of Fear.

Faulkner appeared in many British dramas such as Ivanhoe, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart, Colditz, Lorna Doone, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Secret Army, Blake's 7 and Robin of Sherwood.

The BBC has published a blog on the recent relaunch of the official BBC Doctor Who website.

Written by Andy Dudfield, the Delivery Manager, Future Media & Technology in BBC Wales, the blog explores the brief for the relaunch and the work done to try to make the official site the no.1 destination to experience the world of Doctor Who.

As well as introducing brand new sections for viewers to explore and learn more about characters and monsters from the series, the site will be bring a higher level of production news and will be used to break important Doctor Who stories.

The blog singles out the Fun and Games section of the site as a major priority. A brand new look and feel has been given to this section and it is hoped this will help keep it visually engaging and entertaining. There is also a significant piece of work underway to unlock the archive and move content from the old into the new site.

The nominations for this year's BAFTA Cymru Awards have been released, and once again Doctor Who and its spinoffs are up for several awards — in some cases against themselves!


The BBC itself has some 31 nominations in total. You can find the full list of nominations in the categories at the BAFTA website.

The winners will be anounced at the Bafta Cymru Awards ceremony on Sunday 23rd May at the Wales Millennium Centre. There are limited tickets available to the public, enquire at the Millennium Centre (029 2063 6464).

The BBC Press Office has released details of the fourth episode of the new series The Time Of Angels.

The story by Steven Moffat will air in the UK on 24th April at a provisional time of 6.25pm. Schedules will be fixed next Wednesday.

The episode sees the return of two Steven Moffat creations, The Weeping Angels from the Series Three story, Blink, and River Song played by Alex Kingston, from the Series Four stories Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead.

In this week's edition of Doctor Who Adventures, find out all the facts on Prisoner Zero in this week’s ‘Fast Facts’, and Matt reveals his favourite bits from episode one and how he managed to eat fish fingers and custard!

Plus, the Doctor and Amy make their first appearance in the comic strip, and there's the chance to win a life-size Dalek.

Schedules for the 17th April have been changed slightly with Episode Three of the new series, Victory of the Daleks, now being broadcast on BBC One at 6.30pm.

NB: The BBC HD showing will be delayed until 8.25pm because BBC HD will be showing live football earlier in the evening.

On BBC One the programme will again be preceded on BBC One by Total Wipeout and followed by Over the Rainbow.

On ITV 1 Doctor Who is up against You've Been Framed, Extreme, a series with Harry Hill featuring the best camcorder and mobile phone calamities, the last showing of which was watched by 5 million viewers on 20th March. The last half is up against a new game show The Whole 19 Yards. 19 yards is the distance the contestants have to travel to reach their buzzer - over, under, across and through a gruelling obstacle course. The big hitter in the ITV lineup is the return of Britain's Got Talent at 8pm, the series which launched the career of Susan Boyle last year and the programme which is likely to win the night in ratings terms.

BBC Two offers football with Match of the Day Live and the game between West Bromwich Albion and Middlesbrough, while Channel 4 has Channel 4 News. On Five you can see the 1965 film Major Dundee, an offbeat western starring Charlton Heston and Richard Harris.

Doctor Who Confidential is on BBC Three at 7.15pm, with story writer Mark Gatiss meeting the curator of the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum to see what the conditions were like at the epicentre of the British war effort. Confidential is repeated on BBC HD at 9.10pm.

The BBC has announced the production of four new 'interactive episodes' of Doctor Who which will be available from the official website, bbc.co.uk/doctorwho.

These four new adventures will take the form of downloadable computer games available for PC and Mac, in which players assume control of The Doctor and Amy as they embark on new adventures which complement the new TV series. The games have been produced by a team drawing on the very best talent from TV and gaming. The interactive episodes are executive produced by Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger, Beth Willis and Anwen Aspden from BBC Wales Interactive, alongside Charles Cecil, one of videogaming's most revered creators.

The games are being developed by Sumo Digital, one of the UK's best game designers. Stories and scripts are by Phil Ford, who co-wrote The Waters Of Mars and James Moran who has written for Torchwood.

The project has been commissioned for BBC Online by the Vision Multiplatform team, headed up by Simon Nelson, and is being driven by BBC Wales Interactive.

Matt Smith and Karen Gillan have been digitally recreated in-game, and have provided full voice-overs. Music has been provided by TV series composer Murray Gold. An additional cast will portray original characters and classic enemies.

Steven Moffat, executive producer, Doctor Who, says
Piers Wenger, Head of Drama, BBC Wales, and executive producer, Doctor Who, added
Simon Nelson, head of BBC multiplatform in Vision, said:
Anwen Aspden, executive producer, BBC Wales Online, concludes:
The exact titles of the four episodes are being kept secret for the time being, but the four original stories will take players on a journey throughout time and space, including one location from the Doctor Who series which has never been seen before on screen. Players will encounter new and original monsters, in stories which form part of the overall Doctor Who canon.

The first episode of Doctor Who – The Adventure Games will be available to download for PC and Mac from bbc.co.uk/doctorwho in June 2010. Its title will be revealed at a special press event on 21 April in Sheffield.

BBC America has cleared its schedules to bring its viewers nothing but Doctor Who in the run-up to the new series launch in the United States on Saturday April 17.

Starting at 5am ET, the channel will show the final half of Series 4, starting with The Doctor's Daughter and going right through to Journey's End. From 1.30pm it moves onto the gap year specials with The Next Doctor, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars and The End of Time, taking viewers to the end of the Tenth Doctor's time on the show.

At 8pm it will show Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide, described as a "BBC America original, all-access look inside the universe of the world's biggest, most successful sci-fi television program", before launching Matt Smith to the American public with The Eleventh Hour at 9pm ET.

After an hour's 'Who' break, the channel will repeat The Ultimate Guide and The Eleventh Hour at 11pm, with a further repeat for West Coast viewers at 2am.

The Eleventh Hour gets a further repeat on Sunday April 18 at 5pm, although this will be a cut down version to fit into an hour slot, complete with commercials. A further repeat will be shown on Saturday April 24 at 8pm ET before the US premiere of Episode Two, The Beast Below at 9pm.

An new exhibition dedicated to memorabilia from the classic series of Doctor Who, has opened in Lancaster in the north of England.

The exhibition consists of items from the remarkable collection of Dr Peter Jewell, a life long fan of the series. Over the years he has has amassed a huge number of rare and vintage items based the show, a number of which are now on view at Judges Lodgings in the centre of Lancaster.

The exhibition opened on Good Friday and runs until the end of October.

A full list of Doctor Who events can be found on our Events tab. If you know of an event which should be added to the list, please email the news page.