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On This Day (USA) - 23 August



Desert Island Discs: William Hartnell (23 Aug 1965) premiered on Radio 4 in 1965 at 1:10pm BST

William Hartnell actor discusses with Roy PLOMLEY in a recorded programme devised by him the gramophone records he would take to a desert island.


Dr Who and the Daleks premiered on UK Venues in 1965 at 6:00pm BST

Real Time: Episode Four premiered on BBC Online in 2002 at 12:00pm BST

Deep Breath premiered on BBC One in 2014 at 7:52pm BST, watched by 9.17 million viewers.

The regenerated Doctor is surprised to find a dinosaur running rampant in Victorian London, while Clara is just as worried about what the change in him will mean to their friendship.


Deep Breath premiered on BBC America in 2014 at 8:15pm EDT, watched by 2.19 million viewers.

Clara is alone in Victorian London with a man she doesn't know, a dinosaur in the Thames, and a spate of deadly spontaneous combustions. The Doctor has changed. It's time you knew him.


 Birthdays
Martc Vann will be 70 - 2 credits, including Colin Maloney in The Categories of Life(TW)

Marc Vann is an American actor. He is known for his role as Conrad Ecklie in the CBS television seriesCSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Although this role as the agitator of Gil Grissom has earned the character the dislike of CSI fans, Vann himself has a small, but growing fanbase. He also had notable roles in Angel and Early Edition.

Vann was born in Norfolk, Virginia. He initially had little interest in acting or theater, but he was introduced to the craft through a mime workshop while studying for his MBA. He subsequently got involved in theater before moving to L.A. to start a career as a television actor. Vann was active in local and regional theater in the Chicago area most memorably in his early career at Wisdom Bridge Theatre and Center Theatre. Marc added immeasurably to the success of the Wisdom Bridge Theatre production of "The Great Gatsby" production of Wisdom Bridge that also starred the actor Harry Lennix who was race/color blind cast as Gatsby.

On February 28, 2008, Vann pulled off a special feat, guest starring back to back in new episodes of two different series, both on ABC. First, he played a ship's doctor on the cult phenom Lost, and then played an automotive worker who was bribed into moving to Hawaii and not testifying in a trial in Eli Stone. He was most recently in a skittles commercial as the doctor. In 2011 he appeared in two episodes of Torchwood: Miracle Day as camp manager Colin Maloney.

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


Peter Wyngarde (died 2018 aged 90) would be 97 - credited as Timanov in Planet of Fire
Peter Wyngarde was best known for playing Jason King, the bestselling novelist turned sleuth who appeared in the British television series Department S and Jason King, inspiring the Mike Myers character Austin Powers. 

Peter Wyngarde's origins are shrouded in mystery with the actor himself giving different accounts of his parents and birthplace. He is believed to have been born in France in the late 1920's, with 1927 being the most authoritative date. He grew up in the far east and during World War II was interned in the Lunghua internment camp in Shanghai, set up by the Japanese for European and American citizens living in the city. 

After the war, he sailed to the United Kingdom on the Cunard White Star Line vessel the Arawa, arriving in Southampton at the age of 18. 

After briefly studying law he joined an advertising agency and in 1946 won his first professional role in the theatre. One of his earliest roles was a production of Noël Coward's Present Laughter at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham. 

His first television appearance was a bit part in the 1949 production of Dick Barton Strikes Back. He soon graduated to leading roles playing John the Baptist in the 1956 version of Jesus of Nazareth and Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. 

In 1959 he played Lt Jan Wicziewsky in South one of the earliest gay-themed British TV dramas. the play came just two years after the Wolfenden Report, when homosexuality was still very much a taboo subject, making Wyngarde’s impassioned performance all the more extraordinary. 

In 1969 Wyngarde won the role that would make him a household name in the espionage series Department S. He played the suave womaniser Jason King, a character so popular that he was spun off into his own action espionage series Jason King, which ran for one season of 26 fifty-minute episodes. The series enjoyed global success with Wyngarde briefly becoming an international celebrity. 

During the seventies, he has a succession of smaller roles on television. in 1973 he played the King of Siam in a revival of the musical The King and I at London's Adelphi Theatre. In 1980 he appeared as the masked character Klytus in the film Flash Gordon. 

In 1982 he made his appearance in Doctor Who playing Timanov. He wanted to play the part in heavy disguise but was persuaded by producer John Nathan Turner to show his face. 

Wyngarde virtually retired from acting after a throat infection forced his withdrawal from a stage production of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. His public appearances were mainly restricted to Memorabilia events. 

Peter Wyngarde died at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London on 15 January 2018.

 Deaths
Innes Lloyd (died 1991 aged 65) - 16 credits, including Producer for The Celestial Toymaker

Innes Lloyd was a British television producer of BBC drama. He was the third producer on Doctor Who and responsible for casting the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton.

Following service in the navy towards the end of the war, Lloyd trained as an actor at the Central School. He joined the BBC in the 1950s initially in presentation, moving into outside broadcasts. As an outside broadcast producer he covered many important sporting events such as tennis at Wimbledon, golf, and motor racing. He also produced important state events such as the Queen's Speech and Sir Winston Churchill's state funeral.

Lloyd began his drama career working on popular series in the 1960s. His duration as producer on Doctor Who ran for two seasons between The Celestial Toymaker and The Enemy of the World (excepting The Tomb of the Cybermen which was produced by Peter Bryant as a test piece to show he could take over from Lloyd). 

Lloyd and story editor Gerry Davis came up with an intriguing way of writing the Doctor out - as he was an alien being, they decided that he would have the power to change his body when it became worn out or seriously injured, a process that would later become known within the mythology of the series as regeneration. Whereas John Wiles, the previous producer to Lloyd, had intended to replace Hartnell with another actor but playing the same character, Lloyd and Davis elected to change the entire personality and appearance of the Doctor. They cast Troughton, having considered character actor Peter Jeffrey, and Troughton first appeared fully in the show on 5th November 1966 after the changeover from Hartnell had been seen at the end of the story The Tenth Planet the previous Saturday. That serial also introduced the Cybermen, villains who would return to face the Doctor on several subsequent occasions. Indeed, Lloyd oversaw something of an era of monsters on the programme, introducing durable and memorable enemies such as the Ice Warriors and the Yeti.

Lloyd also worked on Thirty-Minute Theatre, the football soap United! and Dead of Night, but he is best  remembered as the producer of more prestigious drama. As a BBC drama producer in the 1970s and 1980s, his chosen projects were often biographical. Collaborating with authors such as Roger Milner and Don Shaw, he brought to the screen biographies of a diverse range of often flawed heroes, ranging from Orde Wingate and Arthur "Bomber" Harris plus Donald and Malcolm Campbell to the first Director General of the BBC, John Reith. He also explored notions of Englishness in the 20th century with productions such as England, Their England (directed by Stephen Frears), East of Ipswich (written by Michael Palin) and An Englishman's Castle (1978) starring Kenneth More - a dystopian vision of the consequence of losing the Second World War. He was also a frequent collaborator with Alan Bennett. That relationship started in 1972 with Bennett's poignant comedy A Day Out and continued with landmark productions such as the first series of Talking Heads until Lloyd's death in 1991. Bennett's An Englishman Abroad told the remarkable true story of the chance meeting between actress Coral Browne (playing herself) and spy Guy Burgess (Alan Bates) in Moscow in 1958, while A Question of Attribution (finished shortly before Lloyd's death) was a logical sequel, showing the radically different fate of Keeper of the Queen's Pictures and fellow traitor Anthony Blunt.

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