The return of Doctor Who to the nation's television screens on Saturday attracted 8.4 million viewers.
The latest series, featuring David Tennant as the Time Lord and Catherine Tate as his companion Donna, which aired on BBC 1, secured an audience share of 39.4%.
Billie Piper also made a surprise appearance in the initial episode as Rose Tyler.
A BBC spokesman said: "This is a great start for the new series. The show kicked off a fantastic night of family entertainment on BBC 1."
The previous third series of the show secured an average 7.03 million viewers.
As revealed by The Herald last week, fans of Dr Who will be able to see the largest- ever exhibition based on the series, when it fills the exhibition halls at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow next year.
Organisers are already expecting it to be one of the most popular shows staged at the museum, with attendance figures anticipated to beat those achieved by the recent Kylie Minogue exhibition which topped 165,000.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article