The tenure of Doctor Who incarnations

With a new actor being announced tomorrow, it got me pondering about the good Doctor. Specifically, who is the longest serving doctor? IMDB has the data:

whos <- data.frame(  doctor = c(    "William Hartnell",    "Patrick Troughton",    "Jon Pertwee",    "Tom Baker",    "Peter Davison",    "Colin Baker",    "Sylvester McCoy",    "Paul McGann",    "Christopher Ecclestone",    "David Tennant",    "Matt Smith"  ),  n_episodes = c(    136,    127,    129,    173,    70,    35,    42,    1,    13,    49,    44  ),  stringsAsFactors = FALSE)whos$doctor <- factor(whos$doctor, levels = whos$doctor)

Let’s plot it to see how it changes over time.

library(ggplot2)(bars <- ggplot(whos, aes(doctor, n_episodes)) +  geom_bar(stat = "identity") +  coord_flip()) 

There was a definite shift after Tom Baker towards a shorter term as the doctor. In terms of screen time, the shift is a little less pronounced due to the move from 25 minutes to 45 minutes per episode from Christopher Ecclestone onwards (and for one of the Colin Baker series).