the first Doctor Who episode to air since the Doctor Who television film in 1996. Unofficial overnight viewing figures from the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board showed that the episode attracted an average of 9.9 million viewers — 43.2% of the available television audience — over the course of the evening. At its peak, it had 10.5 million viewers, a 44.3% share. The final figure for the episode, including video recordings watched within a week of transmission, was 10.81 million, third for BBC One that week and seventh across all channels. In some regions, the first few minutes of the original BBC broadcast of this episode on 26 March were marred by the accidental mixing of a few seconds of sound from Graham Norton hosting Strictly Dance Fever. Internationally, "Rose" was first transmitted on CBC Television in Canada on 5 April 2005, debuting to strong ratings of 986,000 viewers. In Australia, it was broadcast on 21 May 2005 on ABC to 1.11 million viewers. "Rose" was first broadcast in the United States on the Sci-Fi Channel on 17 March 2006. It was aired back-to-back with the following episode "The End of the World"; Davies had originally wanted the first two episodes to be aired together in the UK but the request was given to the BBC too soon before transmission for the schedule to be altered. The US premiere was watched by 1.58 million viewers. On 30 March, four days after the episode was originally broadcast in the UK, the BBC announced that another full series had been commissioned. On the same day, the BBC released a statement, apparently from Eccleston, saying that he would be leaving the role at Christmas, for fear of being typecast. The BBC later revealed this was not an official statement from Eccleston, whom they had failed to contact before responding to press questions after the story broke. Eccleston later said, "They handled it very badly, but they issued an apology and I dropped it" in a 2010 interview. After it was announced that Eccleston was leaving the BBC said that they were in talks with David Tennant to take over the role and he became the bookmakers' favourite, with odds at 1/10 and William Hill refusing to take any more bets on who would be cast as the new Doctor. A BBC spokesman said that they had "hoped, rather than expected" that Eccleston would continue