"Doctor Who" Statistics
Previously on
Allah Sulu, I mentioned that I was working my way through the old Doctors Who (not necessarily in order; so far I've watched the entire run of Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee, and I'm still working on Peter Davison¹). Given that David Tennant is soon (far too soon!) to be leaving the show, I started to wonder how his tenure compared with that of the other Doctors. I couldn't simply list how many seasons each actor had as the Doctor, since season lengths varied and some regenerations occurred mid-season; nor could I count up how many episodes each actor had as the Doctor because even episode lengths have varied widely (most of them were either twenty-five or forty-five minutes; but there were a number of exceptions, such as David Tennant's hour-long holiday specials and seven-minute Children in Need specials, which are part of the canon - but I did not include non-canonical charity specials like "Dimensions in Time"). So, what I did was added up the lengths (in minutes) of every episode belonging to each Doctor. In a few cases ("The Three Doctors", "The Five Doctors", "The Two Doctors", "Time Crash") more than one Doctor got the episode added to their total (although I did not give Tom Baker credit for "The Five Doctors", nor did I give double credit for regeneration episodes, since regenerations generally happened right at the beginning or the end of the episode, and only one of the Doctors actually did anything). So, using the figures provided by Wikipedia, here are the number of minutes credited to each Doctor:
First DoctorWilliam Hartnell²
3,515Second DoctorPatrick Troughton
3,300Third DoctorJon Pertwee
3,290Fourth DoctorTom Baker
4,450Fifth DoctorPeter Davison
1,838Six DoctorColin Baker
1,035Seventh DoctorSylvester McCoy
1,050Eighth DoctorPaul McGann
89Ninth DoctorChristopher Eccleston
585Tenth DoctorDavid Tennant³
2,114
¹Those three are the only ones out of the original seven that I had any real prior experience with, apart from the crossovers, from when I watched the show back in the 1980s. (In the case of Jon Pertwee, I'd also read some of the novelizations; so I recall the stories, but only now have I actually seen them.)
²Richard Hurndall replaced William Hartnell in "The Five Doctors" since Hartnell had died; I still credited those 90 minutes to the first Doctor.
³David Tennant still has three sixty-minute specials yet to go; so his total time will end up being 2,294 minutes. He places fifth out of the ten Doctors; only the first four had more screen time than he did. (Not having ever watched them, I didn't realize until now how short the tenures of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy were. Their seasons were drastically shortened because of low ratings, which eventually led to an eighteen-month hiatus during Colin Baker's term and outright cancellation after McCoy's three years.)