Statistics


On This Day (USA) - 23 November



An Unearthly Child premiered on BBC One in 1963 at 5:16pm GMT, watched by 4.40 million viewers.

The Invasion: Episode Four premiered on BBC One in 1968 at 5:14pm BST, watched by 6.40 million viewers.

Trapped by Vaughn's men at International Electromatics, the Doctor requests help from the Brigadier and UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.

A UFO is delivering cocoons to the electronics firm – but what is inside them?


Dragonfire: Part One premiered on BBC One in 1987 at 7:37pm GMT, watched by 5.50 million viewers.

Silver Nemesis: Part One premiered on BBC One in 1988 at 7:35pm GMT, watched by 6.10 million viewers.

The Day of The Doctor premiered on BBC One in 2013 at 7:50pm GMT, watched by 12.80 million viewers.

Something terrible is awakening in London's National Gallery, while in 1562 a murderous plot is afoot, and in space an ancient battle reaches its conclusion.


Doctor Who: Behind The Lens premiered on BBC Red Button in 2013 at 9:05pm GMT, watched by 0.10 million viewers.
Voiced by the Sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, catch up with old friends and meet some new ones. It’s a rollercoaster ride and a time to celebrate. Features Matt Smith, David Tennant and Jenna Coleman with Billie Piper and John Hurt, as well as lead writer and executive producer Steven Moffat, discussing their 50th Anniversary experiences.

 Birthdays
Kayvan Novak will be 46 - credited as Voice of Handles in The Time of the Doctor

Born in Cricklewood, London, Kayvan Novak is an actor, voice artist and comedian. He is best known as co-creator of the Channel 4 prank call series Fonejacker and its followup Facejacker, and as Rachid Mansaur in Sirens. Other appearances on television have included Holby City, Spooks, and Skins, in the films Four Lions, Syriana, and is due to play Brains in the 2015 film Thunderbirds Are Go!


Chris Hardwick will be 53 - 4 credits, including Self in The Women of Doctor Who(Factual)

Chris Hardwick is an American stand-up comedian, actor, screenwriter, producer, musician, podcaster, television host, emcee, and voice actor. 

Hardwick is best known for performing with Mike Phirman in Hard 'n Phirm, hosting Singled Out, Wired Science, Web Soup, and Nerdist Industries, and as the voice of Otis in Back at the Barnyard, replacing Kevin James. In 2011 he began hosting Ministry of Laughs, a BBC America Britcom block, and Talking Dead, a live hour talk show on AMC. In August 2013, he began hosting Talking Bad, a live half-hour talk show on AMC.

Hardwick currently hosts @midnight, a nightly comedy series on Comedy Central. He is also the voice of Craig in the Nickelodeon series Sanjay and Craig.


Zoë Ball Ball will be 54 - 2 credits, including Host in Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor(Factual)

Zoë Ball is a television and radio presenter in the United Kingdom.

Born in 1970 in Blackpool, she is the daughter of the mathematical legend Johnny Ball. Her early career was as a researcher for quiz shows before becoming a presenter for The Big Breakfast for Channel 4 and then the Saturday morning children's show Live & Kicking. She then went on to present childrens' art programme SMart.

In October 1997 she became the first female presenter of the BBC's The Radio 1 Breakfast Show, followed by various presenting roles on XFM between 2002 and 2004. In more recent years she has often provided relied presenting duties in BBC Radio 2, covering for Ken Bruce and Chris Evans.

Back on television, she is the presenter of the Strictly Come Dancing followup shows It Takes Two, and she was a contestant on the dancing show herself in the third series, becoming a runner up in third place.

She is married to the DJ and musician Norman Cook and they have two children, Woody and Nelly in Hove, Sussex.


Michelle Gomez will be 58 - 18 credits, including Missy in Deep Breath

Michelle Gomez is an actress best known for her comedy roles in Green Wing, The Book Group, and Bad Education.

Gomez's first major role was in The Acid House, based on three Irvine Welsh short stories. She went on to star in the cult Channel 4 comedy drama The Book Group before playing staff liaison officer Sue White in the comedy Green Wing,

In 2005, Gomez appeared in the film Chromophobia. In 2006, she starred in the film The Good Housekeeping Guide. In 2007 she starred in a drama by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh called Wedding Belles.

She performed as Kate in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Taming of the Shrew. Doctor Who fans may know her from her role as Jevvan in the 2007 Big Finish audio Valhalla

In 2012, Gomez starred in the British film The Wedding Video and the British comedy series Bad Education.


Diana Quick will be 78 - credited as Prime in Scream of the Shalka(Misc)

Diana Marilyn Quick is an English actress.

 

Life

Quick was born in London, England. She grew up in Dartford, Kent, the third of a dentist's four children. She was educated at Dartford Grammar School for Girls, Kent. She was greatly aided by her English teacher, Miss Davis, who encouraged her to pursue acting. She became a member of an amateur dramatic society in Crayford, Kent, whilst at school as well as appearing in many school productions. On leaving school, she went on in 1964 to pursue further studies at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Quick was the first female president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

Her longtime partner was actor Bill Nighy; and they have one daughter, the actress Mary Nighy (born 1984). They separated in 2008. The couple met in 1981 when co-starring in a play at the National Theatre in London. She was previously married to the actor Kenneth Cranham for a short time and had a relationship with Albert Finney that lasted seven years.

Quick spent seven years researching a book about her paternal family's life in India which was published in 2009 by Virago with the title "A Tug on the Thread: From the British Raj to the British Stage". This title is possibly a reference to a line in Brideshead Revisited, in which author Evelyn Waugh uses a quote from a short story by G. K. Chesterton to illustrate the nature of Grace. Cordelia, in conversation with Charles Ryder, quotes a passage from the Father Brown detective story "The Queer Feet": "I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread." In her book Quick reveals that she is of mixed race (Anglo-Indian) descent. Her great-grandfather served 23 years in the army in India before becoming a policeman and her great-grandmother had to flee from the Indian Mutiny after her father was killed.

Career

Quick is perhaps best known for the major role of Lady Julia Flyte in the television production of Brideshead Revisited. She received an Emmy and British Academy Television Awards nomination for her work. Quick has also shown her versatility as actress appearing in many theatre, film and television productions. Her stage work has been most varied with roles in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida to Brecht's The Threepenny Opera.

Most recently she portrayed Queen Elizabeth II in a documentary drama made for television, The Queen: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Camilla?". Prior to accepting the role, Quick had played the same character as a younger woman in Alan Bennett's play, A Question of Attribution. She said of how she prepared for the television role,

"I think one has to try to be as accurate as possible. You have to wear the right clothes, and in my case I wore a white wig, because I'm playing her as a mature Queen rather than when she was a younger woman. So you try and get the externals as accurate as possible, but then I think it's like any acting challenge, you just try to play the situation as truthfully as you can. So you play the spirit of the thing rather than the documentary reality of it."

Biography from the wikipedia article, licensed under CC-BY-SA


Jane Lumb (died 2008 aged 65) would be 82 - credited as Thal in Dr Who and the Daleks(Aaru)

Jane Lumb was an English fashion model and actress in the 1960s.

Lumb was well known for appearing in series of advertisements for Fry's Turkish Delight.

She found fame in the very first international edition of the Pirelli calendar in 1964 when she posed on a beach in Spain.

She had small parts in a number of films including A Hard Day's Night and Goldfinger. 


Michael Gough (died 2011 aged 94) would be 108 - 2 credits, including Toymaker in The Celestial Toymaker

Michael Gough was best known to Doctor Who fans for his role as The Celestial Toymaker alongside the first Doctor, William Hartnell. He later appeared with fifth Doctor Peter Davison when he played the Doctor's old friend Hedin, in the 1982 story Arc of Infinity

Gough was born in Kuala Lumpa in either 1916 or 1915 - he never knew which. Despite the uncertainty about his year of birth, he holds the honour of being one of the longest-lived actors to have appeared in Doctor Who. His career was extraordinary. Between 1947 and 2000, he recorded at least one film per year, often more, in addition to a busy TV and stage career, which included tours with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Michael Gough's unstoppable film career began in the forties, with Androcles and the Lion, but it was his role as Nicholai in Anna Karenina that set in motion a prolific and distinguished movie career. By the early sixties he was well-known to TV viewers through such series as The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Count of Monte Christo, The Saint, ITV's Play of the Week and many more. 

After appearing in the title role of the 1965 Doctor Who story The Celestial Toymaker, Gough started to achieve a cult status among horror film fans, appearing in several notable productions from Hammer and Amicus, while continuing to be a regular face on British TV, with roles in The Avengers, Orlando, The Champions and Theatre 625, to name just a few. Throughout the seventies, he continued making several movies and TV series each year. Among the many classic series he appeared in during that decade are Colditz, The Protectors, Crown Court and Blake's 7. His career continued into the eighties with Brideshead Revisited, Smiley's People and a second appearance in Doctor Who - this time with the fifth Doctor, Peter Davison in Arc of Infinity

After a further decade of TV and film appearances, Gough found new adoration among a new generation of film-goers as Batman's butler, Alfred, in the new films in that franchise which began in 1989. His relentless work-rate continued during the 90s and into the 2000s, and he established a long friendship with director Tim Burton, appearing in Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and, in 2010, Alice in Wonderland.

Gough was married four times - his third wife being Doctor Who actor Anneke Wills. Wills had encountered him at various times during her life - firstly during a theatre trip with her mother in 1952 - but they first met formally, on the set of Candidate for Murder and the attraction was instant. Gough adopted Anneke's daughter Polly, and in 1965, their son Jasper was born. 

After his death, Wills said: "As his body was deteriorating this week, he said that he wanted to hang on for St Patrick's Day. And he did, just. In the end... there is only love."

(Tim Hirst)


Roger Avon (died 1998 aged 84) would be 110 - 3 credits, including Saphadin in The Crusade

Roger Avon was a British film and television actor

He appeared in the 1965 story The Crussade.

Some of his television appearances include Hancock's Half HourDad's ArmyWhen the Boat Comes InDepartment SRandall and Hopkirk (Deceased)Our Friends in the North and Blackadder the Third. He appeared in the films Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 ADThe Likely Lads,Mutiny on the BusesQuatermass and the Pit and Curse of the Crimson Altar amongst others.


 Deaths
Andrew Sachs (died 2016 aged 86) - 5 credits, including Skagra in Shada (Online)(Misc)

Andrew Sachs was born in Berlin in 1930, but his family moved to England in 1938 to escape Germany (his father being Jewish) - they setlled in Kilburn, where the actor spent the rest of his life.

His acting career encompass stage, television and screen, with appearances in series like The Saint, Randall & Hopkirk Deceased, and the film The Night We Dropped A Clanger. However, it was as Spanish waiter Manual alongside John Cleese in Fawlty Towers that was to become his most famous role and a household name. He later appeared in some 27 episodes of Coronation Street as Ramsey, and also in the 2008 Christmas special of Casualty.

On radio, he portrayed Father Brown in the 1980s, and Doctor Watson in original Sherlock Holmes stories for BBC Radio 4 during the 2000s. He also played Professor Chronitis in a 2007 adaptation of Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and Tooley in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere in 2013.

He also played the voice of the Book in the live tour of Douglas Adams's The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 2012.

Though he never appeared in the television series, his Doctor Who credentials included playing Skagra in the Big Finish/BBC Online adaptation of another Douglas Adams creation, Shada, and also Big Finish audio adventures TheBoyThatTimeForgot and Orbis. He also appeared as Temmosus in the BBC Radio 4 audio play Whatever Happened To... Susan Foreman?.

As well as acting he was also a veteran narrator of numerous television and radio documentaries, including all five series of Troubleshooter; he also narrated several audio books, such as the Narnia series by CS Lewis.

In 2012 he was diagnosed with vascular dementia, but this was kept secret until his death in 2016.

His autobiography, I Know Nothing!, was published in 2014.

He married his wife Melody in 1960 (who also appeared in an episode of Fawlty Towers), and had a stepson John and grand-daughter Georgina.


Ingrid Pitt (died 2010 aged 73) - 3 credits, including Solow in Warriors of the Deep

Ingrid Pitt was an actress best known for her work in horror films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Pitt was born in Warsaw, Poland to a German father of Russian descent and a Polish Jewish mother. During World War II she and her family were imprisoned in a concentration camp.

In the early 1960s Pitt was a member of the prestigious Berliner Ensemble, under the guidance of Bertolt Brecht's widow Helene Weigel. In 1965 she made her film debut in Doctor Zhivago, playing a minor role. In 1968 she co-starred in the low budget science fiction film The Omegans and in the same year played "Heidi" in Where Eagles Dare opposite Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.

t was her work with Hammer Film Productions that elevated her to cult figure status. She starred as "Carmilla/Mircalla" in The Vampire Lovers (1970), a film based on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, and played the title role in Countess Dracula (1971), a film based on the legends around Countess Elizabeth B�thory. Pitt also appeared in the Amicus horror anthology film The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and had a small part in the film The Wicker Man (1973).

During the 1980s, Pitt returned to roles in mainstream films and on television. Her role as Fraulein Baum in the 1981 BBC Playhouse Unity, who is denounced as a Jew by Unity Mitford (played by Lesley-Anne Down, who had played her daughter in Countess Dracula), was uncomfortably close to her real-life experiences. Her popularity with horror film buffs saw her in demand for guest appearances at horror conventions and film festivals. Other films Pitt has appeared in outside the horror genre are: Who Dares Wins, (aka The Final Option), Wild Geese II, and Hanna's War. Generally cast as a 'baddie', she usually manages to get killed horribly at the end of the final reel. "Being the anti-hero is great � they are always roles you can get your teeth into."

Pitt made her return to the big screen in the 2000 production The Asylum. The film starred Colin Baker and Patrick Mower, and was directed by John Stewart. In 2003, Pitt voiced the role of "Lady Violator" in Renga Media's production Dominator. The film was the UK's first CGI animated film.

After a period of illness, Pitt returned to the screen in 2006 for the Hammer Films-Mario Bava tribute, Sea of Dust. In 1998, Pitt narrated Cradle of Filth's "Cruelty and the Beast" album, although her narration was done strictly in-character as the Countess she portrayed in Countess Dracula.

Pitt's first book, after a number of ill-fated tracts on the plight of the Native Americans, was a novel, Cuckoo Run, a spy story about mistaken identity. This was followed in 1984 by a novelisation of the Peron era in Argentina

In 1984, Pitt and her husband Tony Rudlin were commissioned to script a Doctor Who adventure. The story, entitled The Macro Men, was one of a number of ideas submitted by the couple, after she appeared in the season 21 DW story Warriors of the Deep. The plot concerned events surrounding the Philadelphia Experiment � a US military experiment during the Second World War to try to make the naval destroyer USS Eldridge invisible to radar � about which Pitt and Rudlin had read in a book entitled The Philadelphia Experiment by leading paranormal investigator Charles Berlitz. It involved the Doctor, and companion Peri, arriving on board the USS Eldridge in Philadelphia harbour in 1943 and becoming involved in a battle against microscopic humanoid creatures native to Earth but previously unknown to humankind. The writers had several meetings with script editor Eric Saward and carried out numerous revisions, but the story progressed no further than the preparation of a draft first episode script under the new title The Macros. The story has now been made by Big Finish in their Doctor Who: the Lost Stories audios, as The Macros.

In 1999, her autobiography, Life's a Scream (Heinemann) was published, and she was short-listed for the Talkies Awards for her own reading of extracts from the audio book, "I hate being second".

She married three times, first to Laud Roland Pitt Jr, an American GI; second to George Pinches, a British film executive; and then to Tony Rudlin, an actor and racing car driver. Her daughter, Steffanie Pitt-Blake, is also an actress.


Bill Strutton (died 2003 aged 80) - 2 credits, including Writer for The Web Planet

Bill Strutton was a prolific British screenwriter who worked on some of the best-remembered 1960s television shows including Ivanhoe, The Saint, The Avengers as well as Doctor Who.

Born in Australia, Bill Strutton won a state scholarship to university at 14 but dropped out after two years to go and work in an office. At the outbreak of WWII he joined the Australian army. He was captured by the Germans in Crete and sent to Stalag VII, learning to swear in several languages. It was there he also began to take an interest in writing.

After the war he took up journalism as a career and in the mid-fifties he began writing military books, including A Jury of Angels in 1957. In 1958 he scripted Ivanhoe, which starred a young Roger Moore. He wrote for more than 15 television series in 11 years, the last of which was Strange Report, starring Anthony Quayle, and several episodes of Paul Temple before retiring in 1978 following a heart attack.


Mostyn Evans (died 1990 aged 67) - 3 credits, including Dai Evans in The Green Death

Mostyn Evans appeared in two Doctor Who stories: as Dai Evans in The Green Death and the High Priest in Death to the Daleks.


Raymond Westwell (died 1982 aged 63) - credited as Prison Governor in The Mind of Evil

Raymond Westwell played the prison governor in the Doctor Who story The Mind of Evil.

Other works include BBC2 PlayhouseKillersBBC Play of the MonthAntony and CleopatraSix Days of JusticeSoftly Softly: Task ForceComedy PlayhouseHunterBellbirdPoint of DepartureBBC Sunday-Night Theatre