The first episode of the new series of Doctor Who was most popular among the "Tom Baker generation" of thirty and fortysomething viewers who remembered the show nostalgically from their 70s childhood.
New figures show one in five of the 10 million viewers who watched the opening episode was aged between 35 and 44.
The sci-fi series returned to BBC1 for the first time in 16 years last Saturday. The debut show had twice as many viewers in the 35-44 demographic as a BBC drama would typically attract.
The programme, starring Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billie Piper as his sidekick, Rose, also had the second biggest audience of any series opener in the show's 41-year history.
Of the 26 previous series, its audience of 9.9 million viewers was beaten only by the launch of Tom Baker's sixth season as the doctor in 1979, which had 13 million viewers. However, Baker's ratings were particularly high because the programme co-incided with a strike on ITV.
BBC drama bosses have already commissioned another series of Doctor Who and a Christmas special before the second episode of the current run has even reached the screen.
Saturday's debut was also the BBC's most popular new Saturday teatime drama for a decade. However, other Saturday night family dramas on BBC1 are surprisingly few and far between.
Doctor Who also beat the debuts of other BBC1 returning dramas including Spooks, which began with 9.2 million, Hustle, with 6.7 million and Cutting It, which started with 5.8m.
However, not even the Doctor could match the eagerly anticipated return of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, which transferred from ITV to BBC1 after two decades off screen in April 2002 with 11.6 million viewers.
The last teatime drama to appear on Saturday at teatime was Bugs, starring Jaye Griffiths and Jesse Birdsall, which averaged just 3.8 million viewers six years ago. The New Adventures of Superman, which ran between 1994 and 1997 and starred Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher - now better known for Desperate Housewives - finished with 5.7 million.
The new Doctor Who, which has been carefully produced to appeal to young and old viewers alike with a mixture of humour, frights and knowing winks to past series, was least popular among 16 to 24-year-olds, who made up only 7% of the audience.
Unsurpisingly, perhaps, the show was more popular among men than women, but only just - with 52% of the audience made up of male viewers.
Baker took over from Jon Pertwee 1974 and played the Doctor for six years. He was also the most popular, with four of his series averaging more than 10 million viewers. The only other doctor to pull in an average audience of 10 million-plus for an entire season was William Hartnell in his second series.
Least popular timelord was Sylvester McCoy, whose 1989 series began with 3.1 million viewers and averaged just 4.2 million. BBC bosses are already banking on Ecclestone outperform him.
Debut audience for each incarnation of the Doctor
1963 William Hartnell - 4.4 million viewers
1966 Patrick Troughton - 4.3 million viewers
1970 Jon Pertwee - 8.4 million viewers
1974 Tom Baker - 10.8 million viewers
1982 Peter Davison - 9.1 million viewers
1984 Colin Baker - 7.6 million viewers
1987 Sylvester McCoy - 5.1 million viewers
1996 Paul McGann - 9.1 million (one-off TV movie)
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