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On This Day (USA) - 13 June



The Aztecs: The Day of Darkness premiered on BBC One in 1964 at 5:14pm BST, watched by 7.40 million viewers.

Tlotoxl is preparing to make his move and have Barbara, the Doctor, Ian and Susan killed. Ian prepares for a fight to the death with the warrior, Ixta.


Inferno: Episode 6 premiered on BBC One in 1970 at 5:26pm BST, watched by 6.70 million viewers.

As Earth in the parallel world faces destruction, the Doctor is desperate to return to his world to warn it of the danger. But time is running out.


Front Row: Noel Clarke premiered on Radio 4 in 2008 at 7:15pm BST

Kirsty Lang talks to Noel Clarke, the actor who played Billie Piper's boyfriend Mickey Smith in Doctor Who.


The Unicorn and the Wasp premiered on SyFy (East Coast Feed) in 2008 at 9:00pm EDT

Trail of the White Worm premiered on Radio 4 Extra in 2015 at 6:00pm BST

The Time Lord tracks an ancient creature in the Peak District.


 Birthdays
Peter Caulfield was 40 - credited as Dahh-Ren in Oxygen

Peter Caulfield is an English actor.

Caulfield trained at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. He started his professional career in the West End where his first production was the musical Our House.

He played Francesco in the Channel 4 drama series Cucumber and E4 spin-off series Banana - both written by Russell T Davies.


Simon Callow was 75 - 3 credits, including Charles Dickens in The Unquiet Dead

Simon Callow, CBE is an English actor, writer and theatre director. born in Streatham, London, UK.

Callow made his stage debut in 1973, appearing in The Thrie Estates at the Assembly Hall Theatre, Edinburgh. In the early 1970s he joined the Gay Sweatshop theatre company and performed in Martin Sherman's critically acclaimed Passing By. In 1977 he took various parts in the Joint Stock Theatre Company's production of Epsom Downs and in 1979 he starred in Snoo Wilson's The Soul of the White Ant at the Soho Poly.

He made his first film appearance, as Schikaneder, in Amadeus in 1984 (having played Mozart in the original stage production at the Royal National Theatre in 1979). He starred in several series of the Channel 4 situation comedy, Chance in a Million, as Tom Chance, an eccentric individual to whom coincidences happened regularly. Roles like this and his part in Four Weddings and a Funeral brought him a wider audience than his many critically acclaimed stage appearances.

At the same time, Callow was successful both as a director and as a writer. His Being An Actor (1984) was a critique of 'director dominated' theatre, in addition to containing autobiographical sections relating to his early career as an actor. At a time when subsidised theatre in the United Kingdom was under severe pressure from the Thatcher government, the work's original appearance caused a minor controversy. In 1992, he directed the play Shades by Sharman MacDonald and the musical My Fair Lady featuring costumes designed by Jasper Conran.[9] In 1995 he directed a stage version of the classic French film Les Enfants du Paradis for the RSC. The production was not a success. Callow has also directed opera productions.

One of Callow's best-known books is Love Is Where It Falls, an analysis of his eleven-year relationship with Peggy Ramsay (1908-91), a prominent British theatrical agent from the 1960s to the 1980s. He has also written extensively about Charles Dickens, whom he has played in a one-man show, The Mystery of Charles Dickens by Peter Ackroyd, in the film Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale, and on television several times including An Audience with Charles Dickens (BBC, 1996).

He was cast as Dickens in the 2005 Doctor Who story The Unquiet Dead, a role he reprised in cameo form for the 2011 season finale, The Wedding of River Song.

Callow appeared with Saeed Jaffrey in 1994 British television series Little Napoleons. In 1996 Callow directed Cantabile in three musical pieces (Commuting, The Waiter's Revenge, Ricercare No. 4) composed by his friend Stephen Oliver. Ricercare No. 4 was commissioned by Callow especially for Cantabile. He voice-acted the sly and traitorous Wolfgang in Shoebox Zoo. In 2004, he appeared on a Comic Relief episode of Little Britain for charity causes. In 2006, he wrote a piece for the BBC1 programme This Week bemoaning the lack of characters in modern politics. He has starred as Count Fosco, the villain of Wilkie Collins's novel The Woman in White, in film (1997) and on stage (2005, in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in the West End).

In December 2004, he hosted the London Gay Men's Chorus Christmas Show, Make the Yuletide Gay at the Barbican Centre in London. He is currently one of the patrons of the Michael Chekhov Studio London. Callow narrated the audio book of Robert Fagles' 2006 translation of Virgil's The Aeneid.

From 11 July to 3 August 2008, Callow appeared at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada in There Reigns Love, a performance of the sonnets of William Shakespeare and also in 2008, he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival performing "Dr Marigold" and "Mr Chops" by Charles Dickens, adapted and directed by Patrick Garland; repeating them from December 2009 to January 2010 at the Riverside Studios and on tour in 2011.

In February 2008, he played the psychiatrist in Chichester Festival Theatre's production of Peter Shaffer's Equus.

Between March and August 2009, he starred as Pozzo in Sean Mathias's production of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett opposite Sir Ian McKellen (Estragon), Patrick Stewart (Vladimir) and also Ronald Pickup (Lucky). The tour opened in Malvern before travelling to Milton Keynes, Brighton, Bath, Norwich, Edinburgh and Newcastle.

From June to November 2010, he appeared in a national tour of a new one-man play, Shakespeare: the Man from Stratford, written by Jonathan Bate, directed by Tom Cairns and produced by the Ambassador Theatre Group. 

Callow has also written biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Orson Welles. He is currently at work on the third volume of his life of Welles. He has also an anthology of Shakespeare passages Shakespeare On Love, and contributed to Cambridge's Actors on Shakespeare series. Callow was also the reader of The Twits and The Witches in the Puffin Roald Dahl Audio Books Collection and has done audio versions of several abridged P. G. Wodehouse books that feature, among others, the fictional character Jeeves. They include Very Good, Jeeves and Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. A devotee of classical music, he has contributed articles to Gramophone magazine.


Peter Benson (died 2018 aged 75) would have been 81 - credited as Bor in Terminus

Peter Benson is an English actor probably best known as Bernie Scripps in the popular ITV1 TV-series Heartbeat, a drama about the police in the fictional "Aidensfield" in the 1960s. He has also had a number of other film and television roles, often playing weak or vacillating characters.

Television and theatre

Benson's other television and theatre work includes the regional premiere of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins. On television his credits include the Dauphin in Shaw's Saint Joan, Henry VI in all three parts of Henry VI and Richard III for the BBC Television Shakespeare Series, Reuben with Bill Maynard in Alan Plater's Trinity Tales, Henry VII in The Black Adder, Bernard in All Creatures Great and Small, Bor in the Doctor Who serial Terminus. Recent roles include the made for TV film Merlin and A Touch of Frost.

He has also had parts in The Royal, Rumpole of the Bailey, Jeeves and Wooster, The Bill, Peak Practice, Casualty, Tenko and Lovejoy, among others.

Benson played Bernie Scripps in Heartbeat between 1995 and 2010. In the TV-series 'Bernie' Scripps ran Aidensfield Garage, and the local funeral service. He was often involved helping first Claude Greengrass (Bill Maynard), his half-brother Vernon Scripps (Geoffrey Hughes) and later Peggy Armstrong (Gwen Taylor) with disastrous money-making schemes.

Film roles

His film work include roles in Michael Crichton's The First Great Train Robbery, John Boorman's Excalibur, and Roman Polanski's Tess.

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


Gary Watson was 94 - credited as Arthur Terrall in The Evil of the Daleks

Gary Watson is a retired British television actor who started out as a stage actor most notably acting in Friedrich Hebbel's 1962 play Judith at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, England with Sean Connery. He was however best known for his appearances in British ITC productions of the 1960s including The Avengers, The Saint and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in 1969 in the last episode The Smile Behind the Veil. In 1966 he played in all 10 episodes of The Three Musketeers as Aramis starring alongside Brian Blessed and Jeremy Brett. He also appeared in the 1967 Doctor Who serial The Evil of the Daleks. He appeared alongside Anthony Hopkins in the 1972 Television series War and Peace. He played the semi-regular character of Det. Insp. Fred Connor in the long running BBC police drama Z-Cars between 1972 and 1974. In 1974 he played George Vavsor for 5 episodes in The Pallisers which also featured Jeremy Irons. In 1977, he played the role of Ross in the BBC series Murder Most English and also appeared in the 1988 BBC adaptation of Macbeth playing MacDuff. He was also much employed as a reader and narrator, featuring in dozens of commercials throughout the 1980s and 1990s, particularly noted for his work in British Transport Films, Lloyds Bank and Nescafé adverts.

He made over 40 appearances on British TV between 1956 and 1988 and many more on radio and advertisements.

He graduated from Cambridge University and in the late 1950s taught English at Westminster City School, located off Victoria Street, London. He was very popular with the pupils and directed some memorable school plays such as Treasure Island starring a young Ken Phillips as Doctor Trelawny.

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


Leonard Grahame (died 2000 aged 71) would have been 96 - credited as Darcy Tranton in The Daleks' Master Plan

Leonard Grahame played Darcy Tranton in 1965 Christmas episode The Feast of Steven.