Statistics


On This Day (USA) - 17 October



The Man Who Never Was: Episode One premiered on CBBC in 2011 at 5:20pm BST, watched by 0.71 million viewers.

The Entropy Composition premiered on Radio 4 Extra in 2015 at 6:00pm BST

A prog rock symphony rediscovered in the vaults can be catastrophic for the entire cosmos.


The Girl Who Died premiered on BBC One in 2015 at 8:23pm BST, watched by 6.56 million viewers.

After they are captured by Vikings, the Doctor and Clara find themselves fighting some space warriors from the future. But why is the Time Lord so preoccupied with one Viking girl?


The Girl Who Died premiered on BBC America in 2015 at 9:00pm EDT, watched by 0.91 million viewers.

Captured by Vikings, the Doctor and Clara must help protect their village from Space Warriors from the future; the Mire. Outnumbered and outgunned their fate seems inevitable. So why is the Doctor preoccupied with a single Viking girl?


 Birthdays
Felicity Jones will be 41 - credited as Robina Redmond/The Unicorn in The Unicorn and the Wasp

Felicity Rose Hadley Jones is an English actress. She started her professional acting career as a child, appearing at age 12 in The Treasure Seekers (1996). She went on to play Ethel Hallow for one season in the television show The Worst Witch and its sequel Weirdsister College. She took time off from acting to attend school during her formative years, and has worked steadily since she graduated from Wadham College, Oxford in 2006. On radio, she is known for playing the long-running role of Emma Grundy in The Archers. In 2008, she appeared in the Donmar Warehouse production of The Chalk Garden.

Since 2006 Jones has appeared in numerous films, including Northanger Abbey (2007), Brideshead Revisited (2008), Chéri (2009), and The Tempest (2010). She stars in the upcoming Star Wars spin-off Rogue One (2016).

Her performance in the 2011 film Like Crazy was met with critical acclaim garnering her numerous awards, including a special jury prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. In 2014, her performance as Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything was also met with critical acclaim, garnering her nominations for the Golden Globe, SAG, BAFTA, and Academy Award for Best Actress.


Patrick Ness will be 53 - 10 credits, including Executive Producer for For Tonight We Might Die(Class)

Patrick Ness is an American author, journalist and lecturer.

He  moved to London at 28 years old and now holds dual citizenship. He is best known for his books for young adults, including the Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls.

Ness won the annual Carnegie Medal from the British librarians both in 2011 and in 2012, recognising each as the best new book for children or young adults published in the U.K.

He is one of seven writers to win two Medals and the second to win consecutively.


Mark Gatiss will be 58 - 60 credits, including Writer for Night Terrors

Mark Gatiss is an English actor, screenwriter and novelist. He is best known as a member of the comedy team The League of Gentlemen. 

He is one of a small group who have both written for and acted in Doctor Who.

Gatiss was born in Sedgefield, England. He attended Heighington CE Primary School and Woodham Comprehensive School in Newton Aycliffe.

Following his childhood interest in Doctor Who, Gatiss's early writing was devoted to the series. His earliest published fiction was a sequence of novels in Virgin Publishing's New Adventures series of Doctor Who stories, beginning with Nightshade in 1992. In these works, Gatiss tried to correct the problems which had led to the show's decline in the late 1980s.

The first television scripts he wrote were for a BBV video series called P.R.O.B.E., four low budget, shortDoctor Who spin-off films which were on video. Although the films featured the ex-Doctors Jon Pertwee,Colin Baker and Peter Davison, they have not been reissued on DVD. Gatiss said in a 2004 interview that he would not authorise their re-release as regarded them as having been a learning exercise.

His other early contributions to the Doctor Who franchise included four novels, two audio plays for BBV and two audio plays for Big Finish Productions.

Gatiss is perhaps best known as a member of the sketch comedy team The League of Gentlemen (along with fellow performers Reece ShearsmithSteve Pemberton and co-writer Jeremy Dyson). He first met his co-writers and performers in his late teens at Bretton Hall, West Yorkshire, a drama school which he attended after finishing school and having spent a gap year travelling around Europe.

The League of Gentlemen began as a stage act in 1995, which won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1997. In the same year the show transferred to BBC Radio 4 as On the Town with the League of Gentlemen, and later arrived on television on BBC Two in 1999. The television programme has earned Gatiss and his colleagues a British Academy Television Award, a Royal Television Society Award and the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux.

In 2005, the film The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse was released, to less enthusiastic reviews. The comedy team has never split up, and may work together again in future.

Outside of the League, Gatiss' television work has included writing for the 2001 revival of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and script editing the popular sketch show Little Britain in 2003, making guest appearances in both. In 2001 he guested in Spaced as a villainous government employee modelled on the character of Agent Smith from The Matrix film series. In the same year he appeared in several editions of the documentary series, "SF:UK". Other acting appearances include the comedy-drama In the Red(BBC Two, 1998), the macabre sitcom Nighty Night (BBC Three, 2003), Agatha Christie's Marple as Ronald Hawes in The Murder at the Vicarage, a guest appearance in the Vic & Bob series Catterick in 2004 and the live 2005 remake of the classic science fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment. A second series of Nighty Night and the new comedy-drama Funland, the latter co-written by his Leaguecohort Jeremy Dyson, both featured Gatiss and aired on BBC Three in the autumn of 2005. He appeared as Johnnie Cradock, alongside Nighty Night star Julia Davis as Fanny Cradock, in Fear of Fanny on BBC Four in October 2006, and featured as Ratty in a new production of The Wind in the Willows shown on BBC One on 1 January 2007. He wrote and starred in the BBC Four docudrama The Worst Journey in the World, based on the memoir by polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard.

Gatiss has also appeared twice in Doctor Who. In 2007, he played Professor Lazarus in The Lazarus Experiment and in 2011 he returned in the Series 6 episode The Wedding of River Song as a character known as Gantok.

Also in 2007, he appeared as Robert Louis Stevenson in Jekyll, a BBC One serial by his fellow Doctor Who scriptwriter Steven Moffat. In 2008 he appeared in Clone as Colonel Black. He also made a guest appearance in Pemberton and Shearsmith's comedy series Psychoville.

In 2010 he portrayed Malcolm MacLaren in the BBC drama Worried About The Boy which focused on the life and career of Boy George, and also appeared as Mycroft Holmes in the BBC drama Sherlock, which he co-created with Steven Moffat. He adapted HG WellsThe First Men In the Moon into a television film of the same name for the BBC, also playing Professor Cavor. He also made a three-part BBC documentary series entitled A History of Horror, a personal exploration of the history of horror cinema.

Gatiss appears frequently in BBC Radio productions, including the science fiction comedy Nebulous andThe Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes story The Shameful Betrayal of Miss Emily Smith. In 2009 he was The Man in Black when BBC Radio 7 revived the character (originally played by Valentine Dyalland Edward de Souza) to introduce a series of five creepy audio dramas. He is also involved with theatre, having penned the play The Teen People in the early 1990s, and appeared in a successful run of the play'Art' in 2003 at the Whitehall Theatre in London. In film, he has starred in Sex Lives of the Potato Men(2004) and had minor roles in Birthday Girl (2001), Bright Young Things (2003), Match Point (2005) andStarter for 10 (2006). The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse, a film based on the television series, co-written by and starring Gatiss, was released in June 2005. He also plays the recurring character of Gold in the audio revival of Sapphire and Steel produced by Big Finish Productions. Gatiss also appeared in Edgar Wright's fake trailer for GrindhouseDon't, a homage to 70's Hammer Horrors.

From December 2010 to March 2011 Gatiss was playing the role of Bernard in Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings at the Royal National Theatre in London alongside Catherine Tate.

In December 2011 he appeared in an episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage in an episode entitled The Science of Christmas, alongside Brian CoxRobin Ince and Richard Dawkins

Fulfilling a lifelong dream, Gatiss has written four episodes for the 2005-revived BBC television series Doctor Who. His first, "The Unquiet Dead" was only the third episode of the revived series in 2005; the second, "The Idiot's Lantern", aired the following year in the second series. After a sabbatical from the third series (in which he acted rather than wrote for), and his submitted script for the fourth series, involving Nazis and the British Museum, remaining unmade, he eventually returned to the programme in 2010, writing "Victory of the Daleks" for the fifth series, and "Night Terrors" for the sixth.

Gatiss has written two episodes of Sherlock, a modern Sherlock Holmes series co-produced by himself and Steven Moffat. The unaired pilot was shot in January 2009 and a full series was commissioned, eventually airing a three-episode series in August 2010 (including Gatiss's episode "The Great Game"). A second series (featuring Gatiss's second contribution "The Hounds of Baskerville") aired in January 2012.

In mainstream print, Gatiss is responsible for a biography of the film director James Whale. His first non-Doctor Who novel, The Vesuvius Club, was published in 2004, for which he was nominated in the category of Best Newcomer in the 2006 British Book Awards. A follow up, The Devil in Amber, was released on 6 November 2006. It transports the main character, Lucifer Box, from the Edwardian era in the first book to the roaring Twenties/Thirties. A third and final Lucifer Box novel, Black Butterfly, was published on 3 November 2008 by Simon & Schuster

Gatiss also wrote, co-produced and appeared in Crooked House, a ghost story that was broadcast onBBC Four during Christmas 2008.

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


Gregory de Polnay will be 81 - credited as D84 in The Robots of Death

Gregory de Polnay is a London-born actor who is noted for his work on British television.

Probably best remembered for his role as Det. Sgt. Mike Brewer in Dixon of Dock Green, de Polnay was also a regular in the Australiansituation comedy series, The Group (1971).

De Polnay's credits include: Space: 1999Doctor Who (the serial The Robots of Death), PoldarkEnemy at the DoorTenkoThe Fourth ArmOne by OneHowards' Way and Boon.

Gregory de Polnay has been an actor, director and voice teacher for nearly forty years, working in all aspects of the theatre with several West End credits to his name and appearing with the RSC in his own production of You Can't Shut Out The Human Voice with the late Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Sir Ben Kingsley. He also has over 100 TV appearances and 350 radio broadcasts to his name.

Due to an accident sustained while playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, USA in 1987, Gregory retrained as a voice specialist at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where he gained the Advanced Diploma in Voice Studies and later on an MA at King's College, London in Text and Performance Studies. Whilst being Head of Voice at the Drama Centre, London and at LAMDA, he has been a prominent member of staff at several major drama schools and has lectured on 'Language and Style' in the USA, Canada and South Africa.

During the past decade, Gregory has directed twenty-one Jacobean and Restoration plays for RADA. He was drama advisor for the BBC World Service Classical Drama Series and has adapted several plays for the BBC World Service. When not directing, Gregory works for several organisations in the field of public speaking and communication skills. He coaches several top TV and sports presenters. Gregory also works extensively for RADA in Business providing communication and presentation skills training for a wide variety of business organisations. He has recently been appointed Director of the RADA Shakespeare Certificate Scheme.

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


Timothy Combe will be 88 - 5 credits, including Director for Doctor Who And The Silurians

Timothy Combe directed early Third Doctor stories and was a production unit manager for the First Doctor stories The Keys of Marinus and The Reign of Terror, as well as directing model sequences on the Second Doctor story The Evil of the Daleks. 

Biography from the TARDIS wiki article, licensed under CC-BY-SA   


 Deaths
Wendy Williams (died 2019 aged 84) - credited as Vira in The Ark In Space

Wendy Williams  is a British actress.

She played Vara in the 1975 story The Ark in Space.

She is best known for her work on television, with credits including: Danger ManZ-CarsThe Regiment,The PallisersThe Carnforth PracticeThrillerSurvivors,PoldarkTenko and The Darling Buds of May. She had a long running role in Crossroads as Mrs. Banks.

She was married to Hugh David.at the time that The Ark In Space was filmed.

Segments of the biography are from Wikipedia, licensed under CC-BY-SA 


Derrick Sherwin (died 2018 aged 82) - 9 credits, including Script Editor for The Dominators

Derrick Sherwin was a British television producer, writer, and actor, best remembered as the story editor (1968-69) and later producer (1969-70) of Doctor Who. 

He was script editor on the stories from The Web of Fear to The Mind Robber, and on the latter tale he wrote the first episode. He also wrote the script for The Invasion, which introduced the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, having adapted the original storyline supplied by Kit Pedler.

In 1968/1969 Sherwin began to take a greater role in the producing side of the series and was the unofficial Assistant Producer for the rest of the series' sixth season, with Terrance Dicks succeeding him as script-editor. On The Space Pirates Sherwin briefly resumed his old role as Dicks was busy writing The War Games. Sherwin then succeeded Peter Bryant as producer of the programme in 1969, overseeing the production of The War Games and Spearhead from Space as well as casting Jon Pertwee in the lead role on the programme. He also made a small on-screen appearance as a car park attendant in Spearhead from Space - he had formerly been an actor and was still a member of the actors' union, and dismissed the actor originally cast in the part for not being able to perform the role adequately.

After Doctor Who, Sherwin was the producer on Paul Temple, The Man Outside (1972), Ski-Boy (1973), and The Perils of Pendragon (1974). Derrick Sherwin now lives in New Zealand and owns Big D Productions.


John Stuart (died 1979 aged 81) - credited as Robed Figure in The Rescue

John Stuart had an uncredited role as a Didonian in the 1965 Doctor Who story The Rescue.