Statistics


On This Day (USA) - 8 March



The Space Pirates: Episode One premiered on BBC One in 1969 at 5:15pm BST, watched by 5.80 million viewers.

The TARDIS arrives on a space beacon in the far future. Mistaken for pirates, the travellers are attacked by Space Corps soldiers. Then the real space pirates arrive.


Genesis of the Daleks: Part One premiered on BBC One in 1975 at 5:30pm GMT, watched by 10.70 million viewers.

The Time Lords send the Doctor, Sarah and Harry to Skaro at a point in time shortly before the creation of the Daleks. The Doctor's mission is to destroy his greatest enemy.


Earthshock: Part One premiered on BBC One (Not Wales) in 1982 at 6:56pm GMT, watched by 9.10 million viewers.

Deadly androids are protecting a bomb buried beneath the Earth from all investigation. However, the Doctor manages to disable it, alerting its owners пїЅ the Cybermen...


Enlightenment: Part Three premiered on BBC One in 1983 at 6:54pm GMT, watched by 6.20 million viewers.

Captain Wrack manipulates Turlough, because she is also working for the Black Guardian. During an Eternals party she places a bomb aboard Striker's ship.


The Caves of Androzani: Part One premiered on BBC One in 1984 at 6:41pm GMT, watched by 6.90 million viewers.

Death Comes To Time: The Child (pt 1) premiered on BBC Online in 2002 at 12:00pm GMT

 Birthdays
Lorna Fitzgerald was 30 - credited as Self in Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor(Factual)

Lorna Fitzgerald is a British actress from Northampton. 

Her most notable role to date is that of Abi Branning in the British soap opera EastEnders.


Lorelei King was 63 - 3 credits, including Narrator in A Town Called Mercy

Lorelei King is one of the most successful and accomplished American actresses working in the UK today, appearing in numerous films from Hollywood blockbusters such as 'Notting Hill' and 'The Saint,' to British independent films, such as 'House of Mirth,' '24 Hours in London,' and 'Suzie Gold.'

Lorelei has appeared as regular and recurring characters in popular British television shows such as Chef, Cold Feet, Alistair McGowan's Big Impression, Emmerdale and the saucy Mile High. She has also made numerous guest appearances in British comedies and dramas such as Jonathan Creek, Not Going Out, The Robinsons and Monarch of the Glen.

Once described as 'the best known American voice on radio 4,' Lorelei has recorded more than 200 programs for the BBC, including the Marx Brothers tribute, 'Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel,' super-hero 'audio movies' including 'Superman,' 'Batman' and 'Judge Dredd and classic American drama such as 'East of Eden,' 'Ethan Frome' and 'A Thousand Acres.' She appears regularly as a panellist on shows such as 'Where in the World' and 'Wordly Wise' and has hosted her own talk show, 'All About Eve.'

Lorelei is a multi- award-winning narrator of audiobooks, recording the works of best-selling authors Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton and Patricia Cornwell among others.

Her work in animation is extensive, and in America she provides the voices for 'Wendy' and 'Packer' (among others) in Bob the Builder.

Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Los Angeles, Lorelei now makes her home in London, where she lives with her husband, actor Vincent Marzello.


Paul Clayton was 69 - 19 credits, including St John Colchester in The Red List

Paul Clayton played Mr Bartle in the Doctor Who story Planet of the Ood. 

He also voiced Henry in the Big Finish Productions audio story The Wormery and Ulysees Meregrass in the Doctor Who story The Infinite Quest.

Other credits include Him & Her, The Secret of Crickley Hall, Wasteland, Coronation Street, Sugartown, Law & Order: UK, Peep Show, Doctors, The Queen, Monday Monday, My Family, Wire in the Blood, Affinity, He Kills Coppers, Hotel Babylon, The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, Gorgeous Labour of Love, The Bad Food Guide, 55 Degrees North, Fakers, Georgian Underworld, Ali G Indahouse, One Foot in the Grave, The Man Who Cried, Kiss Me Kate, Drop the Dead Donkey, Forever Green, Salome's Last Dance, Brideshead Revisited, All Creatures Great and Small, Screenplay, Mersey Pirate


Christopher Wray (died 2014 aged 74) would have been 86 - 2 credits, including PC Groom in The Dæmons

Christopher Wray appeared in two Doctor Who stories: as PC Groom in The Dæmons and Ldg. Seaman Lovell in The Sea Devils.

In later life he owned a Lighting Emporium.


Badi Uzzaman (died 2011 aged 72) would have been 87 - credited as Suzie's Father in They Keep Killing Suzie

Badi Uzzaman was a Pakistani British television and film actor. According to The Guardian, Uzzaman was perhaps best known for his role as a hospital patient in the 1985 television series, The Singing Detective, opposite actor Michael Gambon. He later appeared in numerous television roles during his career, often as a supporting character, including Torchwood, Inspector Morse, Coronation Street, Cracker, The Bill and Casualty.

Uzzaman was born on 8 March 1939, in Phulpur, Azamgarh, British India. His father worked for the railway industry, so he moved to the city of Abbottabad in present-day Pakistan. He continued to move with his family depending on his father's job transfers, which included time in both Quetta and Lahore. Uzzaman graduated from Government College, Abbottabad, in 1959, where he studied English and Urdu.

Uzzaman began his career as a radio presenter in Pakistan. He switched to acting, appearing in roles of Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) following the state-owned channel's launch in 1964.

In 1984, Uzzaman was cast in Malia, a Pakistani film about a traveling fair with a strong, underlying theme against the martial law imposed by the government of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. In the film, Uzzaman played five different characters. The film was sharply rebuked by Zia's government, and had to be completed in London. Uzzaman left Pakistan and was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom soon after Malia's release. He became a British citizen.

He is also notable for playing two television characters who were subjected to racially motivated attacks. The first was in a 1989 episode of Casualty, where he appeared as a shopkeeper who was beaten up by two skinheads who had attacked his son in an earlier assault. In 1994 he played the role of Shahid Ali, a shopkeeper who was the first victim of a spree killer.

At the age of 72, Uzzaman died of a lung infection on 14 June 2011.

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


Bruce Wightman (died 2009 aged 83) would have been 101 - 4 credits, including William de Tornebu in The Crusade

Bruce Wightman appeared in several Doctor Who stories: as William de Tornebu in The Crusade, Scott in The Daleks' Master Plan, and a Radio Operator in Terror of the Zygons.


George Tovey (died 1982 aged 68) would have been 112 - credited as Ernie Clements in Pyramids of Mars

George Tovey played Ernie Clements in Pyramids of Mars.

He was the father of Roberta Tovey, who portrayed Susan in the two Aaru movies from the 1960s, and the adopted father of actor Russell Tovey

Work includes Jack of Diamonds, The Wicked Lady, Kelly Monteith, The Kenny Everett Television Show, A Fine Romance, Shine on Harvey Moon, When the Boat Comes In, The Onedin Line, Hammer House of Horror, Born and Bred, Time of My Life, Minder, To the Manor Born, Hazell, Two's Company, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Play of the Month, Play for Today, Selwyn, Angels, People Like Us, Devenish, Mind Your Language, Citizen Smith, Seven Faces of Woman, Raffles, Mr. Big, The Sweeney, The Crezz, Yus My Dear, Crown Court, And Mother Makes Five, Shades of Greene, Days of Hope, Centre Play, My Old Man, A Little Bit of Wisdom, Oranges & Lemons, Black and Blue, Soap Opera in Stockwell, Love Thy Neighbour, Secrets, Steptoe and Son Ride Again, The Dick Emery Show, Baxter!, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Ghost in the Noonday Sun, Thirty Minutes Worth, Spring and Autumn, Dixon of Dock Green, Till Death Us Do Part, Thirty-Minute Theatre, Budgie, The Train Now Standing, Frenzy, Mike and Bernie, From a Bird's Eye View, The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder, The Laughing Stock of Television, Albert!, Paul Temple, Steptoe and Son, Softly Softly: Task Force, Detective, Mum's Boys, A Man of our Times, Poor Cow, The Vulture, Adam Adamant Lives!, King of the River, Quick Before They Catch Us, Barney Is My Darling, Bindle (One of Them Days), The Wednesday Play, Knock on Any Door, No Hiding Place, HMS Paradise, Diary of a Young Man, Crooks in Cloisters , The Valiant Varneys, Taxi!, Boyd Q.C.. The Dickie Henderson Show, The Victorians, ITV Play of the Week, The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre, Colonel Trumper's Private War, The Secret Partner, ITV Television Playhouse, Never Back Losers, Paul of Tarsus, The Army Game, Life in Emergency Ward 10, Expresso Bongo, The Salvage Gang, Strangers' Meeting, Black Ice, Potts and the Phantom Piper, O.S.S., Potts, Gangbuster, Potts in Parovia, Quatermass II


 Deaths
Maurice Gallagher (died 2026 aged 82) - credited as Floor Assistant for The Krotons

Floor Assistant on The Krotons


James Ellis (died 2014 aged 82) - credited as Peter Warmsly in Battlefield

James Ellis was an actor and stage director with a career stretching over sixty year.

He played Peter Warmsly in the 1989 story Battlefield. 

Ellis was best know for playing Bert Lynch in Z Cars. Other roles included parts in  Randy Dandy, Billy, In Sickness and in Health, Ballykissangel, Playing the Field, One By One, the cult sitcom Nightingales, with Robert Lindsay and David Threlfall. 

In Antonia Bird's Priest (1994), from a screenplay byJimmy McGovern, he played Father Ellerton. Ellis has also contributed cameos to popular series such as Boys from the Blackstuff by Alan Bleasdale, Only Fools and Horses, The Bill, Casualty, Birds of a Feather, Lovejoy, Boon andCommon as Muck.

Ellis is also a writer of poems and prose and a translator. The BBC broadcast a selection of his adaptations from French in 2007.

Cheryl Molineaux (died 2012) - credited as Miss Rutherford in The Ambassadors of Death

Cheryl Molineaux played Miss Rutherford in the 1970 Doctor Who story The Ambassadors of Death.

She also worked on Z Cars, Carry On Doctor, Cuckoo Patrol, Comedy Playhouse, All Gas And Gaiters, The Wednesday Play, No Hiding Place, Teletale, Silent Playground, More Faces of Jim, Dixon of Dock Green, The Skewbald, Passionate Summer, The Story of Esther Costello, and Eight O'Clock Walk

In later life, she and husband John Varley went into the holiday accommodation business, running four seaside cottages at Abbotsbury in Dorset.

She died of lung cancer, also leaving two children and four grandchildren.


Tony Imi (died 2010 aged 82) - credited as Film Cameraman for The Faceless Ones

Tony Imi BSC  was a British motion picture and television cinematographer. 

He was born in London, England. Imi had worked continuously as a cinametographer since the late 1960s.

He was Film Cameraman for the Doctor Who story The Faceless Ones.

Also worked on A Brunette Kiss, Bridge Over Blue, Perfect Life, Four Seasons, Trapped, Starting Over, The Shell Seekers, Candles on Bay Street, Three - III, School for Seduction, The Blackwater Lightship, Lighthouse Hill, Chaos and Cadavers, Silent Cry, Victoria & Albert, Goodbye Charlie Bright, The Testimony of Taliesin Jones, Rancid Aluminium, Lighthouse, Splat!, Aimйe & Jaguar, Only Love, Downtime, Her Desperate Choice, The Abduction, Dalva, The Sunshine Boys, The Haunting of Helen Walker, Scarlett, Shopping, For the Love of My Child: The Anissa Ayala Story, Murder So Sweet, Child of Rage, Against Her Will: An Incident in Baltimore, Carolina Skeletons, Our Sons, The Last to Go, Deadly Identity, Coins in the Fountain, Wings of the Apache, The Old Man and the Sea, Wired, Options, Babycakes, Buster, American Roulette, Empire State, Queenie, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Oceans of Fire, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James, Enemy Mine, Reunion at Fairborough, Not Quite Paradise, A Christmas Carol, Sakharov, Pope John Paul II, Savage Islands, Princess Daisy, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Little Gloria... Happy at Last, Dreams Don't Die, Inside the Third Reich, My Body, My Child, Night Crossing, For Ladies Only, A Tale of Two Cities, The Sea Wolves, Death Penalty, That's Carry On, Steiner - Das Eiserne Kreuz, 2. Teil, North Sea Hijack, Brass Target, The Professionals, International Velvet, The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella, The Likely Lads, Edward the Seventh, The Firefighters, Robin Hood Junior, Percy's Progress, The Zoo Robbery, Elephant Boy, Anyone for Sex?, I Am a Dancer, The Trouble with 2B, Dulcima, The Body, The Raging Moon, Universal Soldier, Junket 89, Inadmissible Evidence, Reaching Out, The Wednesday Play, School for Seduction, House of Mortal Sin, Olimpiada en Mйxico, BBC Play of the Month, The Wednesday Play, Adam Adamant Lives!, The Indian Tales of Rudyard Kipling