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Doctor Who and Coronation Street have a lot in common. They are British dramas that are among the longest-running shows in their respective genres. They are essential components in the history of their respective networks, the BBC and ITV. But they have another, bleaker commonality: both, in recent years, have experienced record-low viewing figures. Last year, for the first time since it began airing, no episode of Coronation Street was seen by more than 5mn people (in 2013, it still had audiences of 10mn and, at its peak, of 20mn). No episode of Doctor Who this year has managed to crack 4mn.
This isn’t the story of a turn away from science fiction or soap opera, but from TV more broadly. If television producers travelled from the UK in 1977 to 2025, looking at the chart positions of the two programmes, they would conclude that Coronation Street and Doctor Who were as strong as ever. But there are now many more programmes, much more choice and very few of us are held to the schedulers’ whims. We watch what we want, when we want to: and as a result even a chart-topper rarely gets above 10mn viewers.
What we are seeing is fragmentation — of where we get both our entertainment and our news. This is a trend that our time-travelling producers would begin to understand as they looked at the viewing figures for Clarkson’s Farm (Amazon, a touch over 4mn viewers) and Department Q (Netflix, a hair under 3mn). Even what we now think of as a ‘massive hit’ has changed. Netflix’s Adolescence, which became the first streaming show to top the weekly viewing charts, did so with 6mn viewers: scarcely more people than watched The Trial of a Time Lord in 1986, the period many believed to be Doctor Who’s creative nadir. In France, television viewing reached an all-time low in 2023, while in the US, cable television, once a reliable cash cow, is increasingly a poor cousin to streaming.
Occasional moments produce something that our 1970s time traveller would recognise as a proper hit (ITV’s terrific drama about the Post Office Scandal got 13mn viewers) while sporting success for the national team still enjoys record-breaking viewing figures. But the reality is that with some exceptions — a Ludwig here, a Traitors there — everywhere in the rich world, the era of truly “popular culture” is over.
This has been fantastic news for consumers: the past decade has seen television of extraordinary depth and breadth. But it has been bad news for the industry, given that fewer and fewer people can make a regular living from it.
More importantly, it is bad news for modern states, which are held together to some extent by the sense that we are all part of a collective endeavour. Those of us who are prime working age, who receive and need vanishingly little in the way of state largesse, cross-subsidise the expensive things we will (hopefully) do at the start and end of our lives: get educated, get sick, grow old, and die.
That essentially depends on some mutual sympathy: that the child, who is not my own, whose education I pay for through my taxes, and the retiree, who I have no relation to, whose pension payments come out of my pay packet, are part of a shared endeavour.
But the decline of shared viewing is eroding shared cultural reference points. An understated reason for the success of Doctor Who and Coronation Street was the success of the BBC and ITV’s news services; they reinforced each other. The age of Adolescence is also the age in which many more of us get our news from GBNews, or TikTok, or nowhere at all.
When we no longer have a shared reality, this sense of a collective endeavour is harder to cultivate. It is then that our societies no longer have the required level of shared sympathy to make the young willing to subsidise the old, adults happy to pay for other people’s children and an agreed upon framework of facts — not least ‘was this election fair?’ — which representative democracies require to function.
The BBC, home of Doctor Who, was founded in 1922, just seven years before the first general election in which men and women could vote on the same terms. Coronation Street is older than widespread colour television.
Politics may be downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of technology: and it is not clear how British democracy will be able to thrive without that shared sense of reality and culture, created in the last century, in part, by a shared media.
The UK might lose more than a soap opera in a world where Coronation Street is no longer a cultural touchstone.
stephen.bush@ft.com
