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On This Day (USA) - 6 April



Fury From the Deep: Episode 4 premiered on BBC One in 1968 at 5:15pm BST, watched by 6.60 million viewers.

Investigating the impeller shaft, Van Lutyens is overwhelmed by the weed creature. A call comes from one of the off-shore rigs � the weed creatures are attacking and taking over!


The Monster of Peladon: Part Three premiered on BBC One in 1974 at 5:30pm BST, watched by 7.40 million viewers.

Desperate to avoid a revolt from the miners,the Doctor attempts to expose the fraud of Aggedor's ghost. Alpha Centauri has summoned Federation troops, but whose side are they on?


Front Row: Murray Gold (Kafka) premiered on Radio 4 in 2011 at 7:15pm BST

Doctor Who composer and playwright Murray Gold has created Kafka The Musical, a new Radio 3 production starring David Tennant. Gold's music also features in the National Theatre's new production of Rocket to the Moon starring Keeley Hawes. He discusses why he was inspired by Kafka.


The Rings of Akhaten premiered on BBC One in 2013 at 6:15pm BST, watched by 7.45 million viewers.

 Birthdays
Teddy Sears will be 47 - 4 credits, including Blue Eyed Man in The Categories of Life(TW)

Teddy Sears is an American television actor, best known for his roles on One Life to Live and the TNT series Raising the Bar.

Sears was born in Washington, D.C and raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland in a close-knit family that can be traced back to Plymouth, Massachusetts in the year 1630. He attended high school at Landon School in Bethesda, MD. In high school, he was captain of the varsity football team and was awarded all-state honors as a tight end, as well as receiving a national top-ten ranking in the 100-yard breaststroke. Sears played varsity football for the University of Maryland. carrying on the family tradition of athletic excellence inspired by his great-grandfather who won a gold medal in the 1912 Olympics for pistol shooting, and again by his aunt who took home a bronze in the 1956 Olympics for the 100-yard butterfly.[2] He transferred and graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in business management in 1999.

Sears' business career was sidetracked when he arrived in New York after graduation. After his first audition he wound up with a 2-year contract role on the daytime series One Life to Live. Then, after several appearances on the Law & Order franchise and Whoopi, he decided to pursue a two-year acting program with one of New York's top teachers, William Esper. This "serious" training ironically led to comedy stints on The David Letterman Show andLate Night with Conan O'Brien. Teddy landed his first studio film when he flew himself out to Los Angeles to read for an unrelated project.

He co-starred on the TNT original series Raising the Bar portraying public defender Richard Patrick Woolsley.

Recently, Sears appeared in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse the Lifetime Original movie The Client List, and Thomas Cole in The Defenders.

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


Jonathan Firth will be 57 - 3 credits, including Sebastian Duke of Cardenas in Kingdom Of Lies(BF)
An English actor best known for his roles in such noted British television productions as Middlemarch, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Victoria & Albert. 

Mark Strickson will be 65 - 46 credits, including Turlough in Mawdryn Undead

Mark Strickson  is a British TV producer and actor best known for his acting role as the character of Vislor Turlough alongside Fifth Doctor Peter Davison.

Strickson was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. He attended King Edward VI Grammar School in his home town, and was also a chorister at Holy Trinity Church (Shakespeare's Church), where his father John Strickson was organist and choirmaster. He studied drama at RADA in London. After he left Doctor Who, Strickson emigrated to Australia where he studied zoology at the University of New England, Armidale. He now lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.

As an actor, he appeared in the BBC medical series Angels, before landing his part in Doctor Who, in which he starred for two years. He also played the young Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol.

Strickson is now a documentary producer and director, especially of wildlife documentary programmes. He has produced programmes for, amongst others, the Discovery Channel, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Animal Planet. He was the person who brought Steve Irwin to public attention with such shows as The Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World.

Strickson appeared at Doctor Who's 20th Anniversary celebrations in Longleat in 1983 alongside many other cast and crew from the series. He has reprised the role of Turlough in the Big Finish Productions Doctor Who audio dramas. He has also contributed interviews and voiceover commentaries for DVD releases of his various Doctor Who serials.


Richard Willis will be 66 - credited as Varsh in Full Circle

Richard Willis was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and became a child actor, featuring in shows such as The Zoo Robbery, Soldier and Me, and Churchill's People. He studied at RADA, and his career continued with shows including The Doombolt Chase, The Feathered Serpenet and A Bunch Of Fives. In 1980 he appeared in Full Circle, where he met his first wife, co-star June Page.

He married actress Kate O'Mara in 1993, but the marriage was dissolved after three years. He later married Lori Haley Fox in 1997 and moved to the United States in 2001.

Theatre work includes The Tempest at the Drayton Hall Theatre Columbia, The Cherry Orchard for The Chekhov Collective/Canadian Stage, an received a Helen Hayes Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance as Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the Folger Theatre, Washington DC. He also featured in Ubisoft's game Assassins Creed Syndicate.

He married his current wife, the Canadian author Heidi Reimer, in 2007. They collaborated on his solo play Strolling Player in 2012, which was performed in Washington DC, Hastings in the UK, and at The Tarragon Theatre for the Toronto Fringe Festival.

In recent years he played Anton Chekhov in I Take Your Hand In Mine at the Tarragon Extra Space in Toronto, and as Jim in Breathing Corpses at the Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto, winning a MyTheatre Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor. In 2018 he directed A Midsummer Night's Dream for The Chekhov Collective at The Citadel in Toronto. In 2019 he will play the title role in Cyrano at SLSF.

He is currently artistic director of The St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival.


Glen Murphy will be 67 - credited as Dibber in The Trial of a Time Lord (The Mysterious Planet)

Glen Murphy MBE  is an English actor.

He is perhaps best known as George Green between 1988 and 2002 on the television drama London's Burning.

He has also had roles on The BillDream TeamCasualty and Doctor Who (in the 1986 story "The Mysterious Planet" as Dibber) and more recently Fathers of Girls, Karl Howman's feature debut starring Ray Winstone.

He was awarded an MBE in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours for his charity work.[1]

Glen Murphy was awarded the Freedom of the City of London in 1995.

He now lives in Essex with his wife and four children.

Glen Murphy supports West Ham United and also likes horse riding. His father - Terence Murphy, uncle - Joe Lucy and uncle - Eddie Wright, were all boxers. Glen's first fight was at the age of nine. He became a British Schoolboy Champion and went onto fight for England. Glen also played football for Chelsea as a schoolboy and became an apprentice with Charlton.

Glen is the patron of the SupportLine charity. SupportLine provides a confidential telephone helpline offering emotional support to individuals on any issue. He is a British karateka black belt in karate he graded for his shodan in November 1989, having trained for 6 years under Dickie Wu, Terry Stewart & Jamie O'Keefe, and currently still trains in the kyokushin style BKK in addition to karate he has also studied boxing, fencing, tang soo doo, & the new breed training system. He speaks English, Italian and some Japanese, He has a production company, Finger Of Suspicion Films along with fellow producer Steve Darts, and they have four films in development and are in the final stages of post production on Lost in Italy (New York Hells Kitchen World Cinema Best Film Award)and are in pre production with there next feature due to shoot in the new year.

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


John Hartshorn (died 2003 aged 62) would be 83 - 2 credits, including Studio Sound for The Horns of Nimon

John Hartshorn, also known as John Stewart, was a well known and well respected sound supervisor at the British Broadcasting Corporation.

His credits included Blue PeterJackanory, Top of the Pops, Doctor Who, Wogan, The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobeThe Duchess of Duke StreetIn Sickness and In HealthTill Death Us Do PartJuliet Bravo and Hancock

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


Terrence Hardiman (died 2023 aged 86) would be 87 - 6 credits, including Hawthorne in The Beast Below

Terrence Hardiman was an English actor. He is best known for playing The Demon Headmaster in the children's television series of the same name, and also for Reinhardt in the 1970s drama series Secret Army.

Hardiman was often seen playing authority figures, and played Nazis-era German military personnel (Secret Army and Colditz) and British officers (When the Boat Comes In), police inspectors (Juliet Bravo and Softly, Softly), doctors (Home to RoostThe Royal), barristers (Crown Court and The Brittas Empire), judges (The Bill and The Courtroom), Father Radulfus (Cadfael), and of course a headmaster. He also played Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi.

Major Reinhardt, (Hardiman's role in Secret Army) was the (fictional) head of the Luftwaffe (German Air force) police and as such often provided a foil to Clifford Rose's more brutal S.S. Chief, Kessler. As with many of the characters in Secret Army, Reinhardt was not a one-dimensional baddie, but a rounded character who often questioned his own motives and methods. The actor's portrayal allowed the viewer to sympathise with this character. In 1990 he played a two-dimensional German officer, General Stuckler, in the final series of London Weekend Television's Wish Me Luck.

The Demon Headmaster was a children's television drama series which proved popular with adults as well, and which ran to three series from 1996 to 1998. Hardiman played a truly villainous headmaster in pantomime style, complete with glowing eyes.

He also had a starring role as Charles Pooter in the 1979 television adaptation of George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, a role which shows his versatility more than the succession of officers he usually portrays.

Hardiman's other recurring role was as Brother Cadfael's boss, Abbot Radulfus, in the television series. Joining him throughout the series as Prior Robert was Michael Culver, who had played his predecessor Major Brandt in Secret Army.

A notable small role Hardiman played was a version of the Sergeant Wilson character from Dad's Army in an episode of time travel comedy Goodnight Sweetheart, called "Don't Get Around Much Any More", in which Nicholas Lyndhurst's character Gary Sparrow goes back in time to a 1940s bank and encounters characters called Mainwaring and Wilson. Hardiman's portrayal was a keenly observed impersonation of John Le Mesurier's own performance, incorporating many of the tics and mannerisms of the original. Hardiman is also famous for his role of Chief Wizard Egbert Hellibore in four episodes of the television series The Worst Witch.

Hardiman appeared in the second series of The Worst Week of My Life, the comedy series starring Ben Miller. Another notable recent role was as a devious Swiss murder victim in an episode of crime mystery series Jonathan Creek.

He has also appeared in the daily soap Doctors on BBC1 at 3 April 2009 and in the Yorkshire drama Heartbeat as John Upton in one episode.

In 2009 he appeared in a 3D film for the BFI called Radio Mania directed by British artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.

Hardiman appeared as Hawthorne in the Doctor Who episode The Beast Below on 10 April 2010.

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


Katie Cashfield will be 87 - credited as Thal in The Daleks

Katie Cashfield played a Thal in the Doctor Who story The Daleks.

Also worked on Steptoe and SonCrying Down the LaneThe Terror of the TongsInn for TroubleJack the RipperNudist ParadiseNaked Fury


Leon Eagles (died 1997 aged 65) would be 92 - credited as Jabel in The Face of Evil

Leon Eagles played Jabel in the Doctor Who story The Face of Evil.


Terry Bale (died 2004 aged 73) would be 94 - 2 credits, including Voice of Arcturus in The Curse of Peladon

Actor who played  Voice of Arcturus in the 1972 story The Curse of Peladon


Michael Rathborne (died 1971 aged 47) would be 101 - credited as Taxi Driver in The War Machines

Michael Rathborne was born in 1923 in York, and worked on a number of television programmes during the 1950s and 1960s. As well as his role in Doctor Who, sci-fi/fantasy appearances included Quatermass II and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and other work included The Buccaneers, No Hiding Place, Call the Gun Expert and Connecting Rooms.

The actress Pippa Rathborne is his daughter.


 Deaths
James Garbutt (died 2020 aged 95) - credited as Ronson in Genesis of the Daleks

James Garbutt  is a British actor, who has been active on television since the 1960s. Originally from the North East of England, he was a key member of the People's TheatreNewcastle upon Tyne during the 1950s and '60s.

He played Ronson in the 1975 story Genesis of the Daleks.

His credits include: The TroubleshootersThe BorderersZ-CarsThe Onedin LineWarshipBill BrandWhen the Boat Comes InJuliet BravoOne by OneAll Creatures Great and SmallBoonBetween the Lines and Casualty.


Honor Blackman (died 2020 aged 94) - 2 credits, including Professor Lasky in The Trial of a Time Lord (Terror of the Vervoids)

Honor Blackman is an English actress, known for the roles of Cathy Gale in The Avengers (1962�64) and Bond girl Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964).

Blackman was born in PlaistowNewhamLondon. Her father Frederick was a statistician. Blackman was educated at Ealing Girls' School in west London and trained as an actress at theGuildhall School of Music and Drama, after her father on her fifteenth birthday thought that an appropriate birthday gift would be acting lessons. While attending the Guildhall School she also worked as a clerical assistant for the Home Office.

Blackman's film debut was a nonspeaking part in Fame is the Spur (1947). Other films include Quartet (1948) and So Long at the Fair (1950) with Dirk BogardeA Night to Remember (1958); Life at the Top (1965) with Laurence Harvey,The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970), and the Western films Shalako (1968) with Sean Connery and Brigitte Bardot and Something Big (1971) with Dean Martin. She played the role of Hera in Jason and the Argonauts (1963). She also did an overdub for an actress in the same film providing the voice for the character of Medea. More recently, she has had small roles in the films Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) and Jack Brown and the Curse of the Crown (also 2001).

Blackman as Pussy Galore, 1964

Bond film producer Albert R. Broccoli admitted that Blackman had been cast on the back of her success in The Avengers, despite the fact that the American audience had never even seen the programme. Broccoli said, "The Brits would love her because they knew her as Mrs. Gale, the Yanks would like her because she was so good, it was a perfect combination".[5]Blackman was the first and one of two "Bond girls" older than the actor playing James Bond, and at 38 she was the oldest actress ever to play a Bond girl.[6]

In 1981, she was in the London revival of The Sound of Music opposite Petula Clark, which opened to rave reviews with, at that time, the largest advance sale in British theatre history. She spent most of 1987 at the Fortune Theatre starring as the Mother Superior in the West End production of Nunsense. From 2005 to 2006, she toured the country as Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady. Her show Word Of Honor premiered in October 2006. In April 2007, she took over the role of Fraulein Schneider from Olivier Award-winning actress Sheila Hancock, in Cabaret at the Lyric Theatre in London's West End. She left the show at the end of September 2007.

One of her earliest appearances on TV was in a recurring role as Nichole, secretary/assistant to Dan Dailey's character of Tim Collier in the 1959 series The Four Just Men.

In a 1965 episode of The Avengers, titled "Too Many Christmas Trees", John Steed received his Christmas cards, one of which was from Cathy. "A card from Mrs Gale!", Steed exclaims in delight. Then, reading the inscription, he says in a puzzled voice, "Whatever can she be doing at Fort Knox...?". It was an inside joke, as Blackman was filming Goldfinger at the time.

Blackman co-starred with Richard Basehart as a married pair of Shakespearean actors who commit a homicide in the Columbo episode "Dagger of the Mind" with Peter Falk.

In 1986, she had a role in the Doctor Who serial The Trial of a Time Lord. From 1990 to 1996 she appeared as Laura West on The Upper Hand. Blackman took a guest role on Midsomer Murders as ex-racing driver Isobel Hewitt in the episode "A Talent for Life". In September 2004, she briefly joined the Coronation Street cast in a storyline about wife swapping.

In 2007, she participated in the BBC TV project The Verdict, as one of 12 well-known figures forming a jury to hear a fictional rape case. The series was designed to explore the jury system. She was sworn in as a juror as "Honor Kaufmann".

A song she recorded with Patrick Macnee during 1964, "Kinky Boots", was a surprise hit, peaking at No.5 in 1990 after it was played incessantly by BBC Radio 1 breakfast show presenter Simon Mayo. After her appearance inGoldfinger, Blackman recorded a full album of songs, "Everything I've Got".

On 6 July 2009, Blackman released a new single, "The Star Who Fell from Grace", composed by Jeff Chegwin and Adrian Munsey and compered a James Bond Prom as part of the "Welsh Proms" concert series.

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


Keith Pyott (died 1968 aged 66) - credited as Autloc in The Aztecs

Keith Pyott  was a British actor.

He transferred from stage to screen and was a regular face in drama in the early days of television, appearing in The PrisonerOut of the UnknownThe Avengers and the Doctor Who storyThe Aztecs.

He also appeared in over twenty feature films, including Orson WellesChimes at Midnight (1965).