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On This Day (USA) - 17 August



The Dominators: Episode 2 premiered on BBC One in 1968 at 5:14pm BST, watched by 5.90 million viewers.

The Doctor and Jamie are taken captive by the Dominators and subjected to intelligence tests. Zoe heads to the Dulcian capital to request help, but the pacifist Dulcians are reluctant to act.


42 premiered on SyFy (East Coast Feed) in 2007 at 8:00pm EDT

 Birthdays
Helen McCrory (died 2021 aged 52) would be 56 - credited as Rosanna in The Vampires of Venice

Helen McCrory is a British actress. 

She portrayed Cherie Blair in both the 2006 film The Queen and the 2010 film The Special Relationship. She also portrayed Narcissa Malfoy in the final three Harry Potter films. In 2011, she starred in Martin Scorsese's family mystery film Hugo as Mama Jeanne.

McCrory was born in London. Her mother, Anne (n�e Morgans) is Welsh, and her father, Iain McCrory, is a Glasgow-born Scottish diplomat. She is the eldest of three siblings and was educated at Queenswood, a Hertfordshire boarding school, before spending a year living in Italy, and after returning to England, she began studying acting at Drama Centre London.

She appeared in Charles II: The Power and The Passion (2003), as Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, and in supporting roles in such films as Interview with the Vampire (1994), Charlotte Gray (2001), The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), and Casanova (2005). In The Queen (2006) she played Cherie Blair, a role she reprised in Peter Morgan's follow up, The Special Relationship.

She appeared in a modernised TV adaptation of Frankenstein's Monster, simply called Frankenstein. Her first pregnancy forced her to pull out of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), in which she had been cast as Bellatrix Lestrange. (She was replaced by Helena Bonham Carter.) However, McCrory later played Bellatrix's sister Narcissa Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, released in July 2009. McCrory also reprised her role in the final movies, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows � Part 1 and Part 2.

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


Stephen Flynn (died 2000 aged 47) would be 71 - credited as Grigory in Revelation of the Daleks

Stephen Flynn played Grigory in the 1989 Doctor Who story Revelation of the Daleks.

Other work includes One Man's MeatThe BillHowards' Way


John Humphrys will be 81 - credited as Presenter in Mastermind(Related)

John Humphrys is a Welsh author, journalist and presenter of radio and television, who has won many national broadcasting awards.

From 1981 to 1987 he was the main presenter for the Nine O'Clock News, the flagship BBC news television programme,and since 1987 he has been a presenter on the award-winning BBC Radio 4 programme, Today.

He is also currently the host of the BBC Two television quiz show Mastermind


 Deaths
Joseph Lippiatt (died 2012 aged 31) - 6 credits, including Crew/Technician in Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways

Joey Lippiatt was a student at Brislington Comprehensive, Filton College, BAPA and attended the Bristol Old Vic Youth Theatre.

He was a familiar face on the sets of Casualty and Doctor Who amongst many others.

He died in 2012 at the age of 31 after a battle with melanoma cancer.


George Giles (died 2007) - credited as Guard Captain in The Curse of Peladon

George Giles worked in the 1970s on shows like Doomwatch, Z-Cars, Paul Temple and Arthur of the Britons.


Graham Williams (died 1990 aged 45) - 19 credits, including Producer for Horror of Fang Rock

Graham Williams was a British television producer and script editor, whose was producer of Doctor Who from 1977-1980, responsible for 72 episodes.

Williams worked as script editor for The View From Daniel Pike (1971), Sutherland's Law (1973), Z-Cars (1975-1976) and Barlow at Large (1975) before joing Doctor Who as producer. 

He was appointed to the role by Bill Slater, then BBC Head of Serials. He followed Philip Hinchliffe, who had been responsible for one of the  most successful periods of the show's history, but who had been criticized for the levels of violence. 

Williams was instructed by BBC drama bosses to tone down the violence. Williams later said of his time on Doctor Who: "It all went wrong right from the start, when I was told to make the show more funny, and less violent. Unfortunately, this would have required a lot of money, of which we had practically sod all. Tom Baker, however, thought it was a splendid idea, and kept putting in all these bad puns and terrible jokes, which didn't get any better when I brought Dougie Adams in."

Although the viewing figures dipped somewhat during Williams' first two seasons, they remained fairly healthy and in 1979, the series achieved ratings as high as 16.1 million viewers - although this was partly attributable to the strike which took ITV, the BBC's main competitor, off the air.

Williams also wrote significant portions of the script for two stories beset by writing problems, City of Death and The Invasion of Time.

During his period on the programme, Williams worked closely with three script editors: the experienced Robert Holmes; Anthony Read; and Douglas Adams, who penned some of the most well-regarded stories of the Williams era and who went on to write hugely popular novels and scripts such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Williams left the series after three years, handing over to John Nathan-Turner who had worked under him as Production Unit Manager.

During Nathan-Turner's reign as producer, Williams was approached by script editor Eric Saward to write a story for Colin Baker's second season. The script was at an advanced stage when it was abandoned, as were all the scripts initially commissioned for that season, after the series was put on hiatus in February 1985. In 1989 Williams wrote a novelisation of his story, The Nightmare Fair.

In 1985, he helped design the Doctor Who text video game Doctor Who and the Warlord.

His work on the series is examined in some detail in the documentary 'A Matter of Time' (included in the 2007 BBC DVD release of The Key to Time series), which includes excerpts from two interviews with Williams, conducted at 1980s Doctor Who fan conventions.

He left the BBC in the early 1980s and went on to produce drama series for ITV, including Supergran, before leaving television in the late 1980s to run a country hotel in Tiverton, Devon.

He died in a shooting accident at that hotel on 17 August 1990. He left a widow, Jacqueline, and three children.

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