Statistics


On This Day (USA) - 14 April



Planet of the Daleks: Episode Two premiered on BBC One in 1973 at 5:53pm BST, watched by 10.70 million viewers.

The Doctor recovers from his coma and befriends a Thal expedition but is captured by the Daleks and taken to their base. Then a second Thal expedition arrives with terrible news...


Dalek premiered on SyFy (East Coast Feed) in 2006 at 9:00pm EDT

Gridlock premiered on BBC One in 2007 at 7:40pm BST, watched by 8.40 million viewers.

Are We There Yet? premiered on BBC Three in 2007 at 8:25pm BST

 Birthdays

Josie Taylor was 41 - credited as Check-in girl in The Girl Who Waited

Daughter of writer Frederick Taylor.

Born in England, but spent the majority of her childhood in Sydney, Australia.

She played the Check-in girl in the 2011 story The Girl Who Waited

After performing a monologue from the play 'My Name Is Rachel Corrie,' at her graduation showcase in 2006, she was spotted by a casting director from The Royal Court Theatre in and asked to audition for the title role. Hours later, she met director Alan Rickman, and went on to succeed Megan Dodds as Rachel.

Attended the Webber Douglas Acadmey of Dramatic Art in South Kensington.


Michelle Duncan was 46 - credited as Lady Isobel MacLeish in Tooth and Claw

Michelle Duncan is a Scottish actress. She was nominated for a BAFTA Scotland Award for her performance in Sea of Souls.

She played Isobel MacLeish in the 2006 Doctor Who story Tooth and Claw.

Born in Perth, Duncan trained in acting at Queen Margaret UniversityEdinburgh before studying English and Classics at St Andrew's University. She moved to London in February 2005.

Her roles on TV include Sugar RushLow Winter SunLost in Austen, and a TV film, Whatever Love Means, as Princess Diana. She has also appeared in such films asAtonementThe Broken and Driving Lessons, and she co-starred in the award-winning 2006 British short film Sucking Is A Fine Quality In Women And Vacuum Cleaners. On stage she has appeared in plays such as Time and the Conways (on UK tour) and A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Burning at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She is soon to appear in the third episode of 'New Tricks'.

In 2007 she was cast as Portia in The Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare's Globe, but was unable to continue after the previews and was replaced by Kirsty Besterman.

She now works at Forest School, Snaresbrook, as a Drama and English Teacher.


Peter Capaldi was 66 - 68 credits, including The Doctor in Dark Water / Death in Heaven

Peter Capaldi  is an Academy Award and BAFTA award winning Scottish actor and film director.

On Sunday 4th August 2013 it was announced he will take on the role of the Twelfth Doctor.

Capaldi has already appeared in Doctor Who when, in 2008, he played a fictional version of Caecilius in "The Fires of Pompeii". He returned to the Doctor Who franchise in 2009, playing civil servant John Frobisher in the third series of Torchwood

Capaldi is best known for playing political spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the British TV comedy series The Thick of It and the affiliated feature film In the Loop. In 2006, Capaldi was nominated for the BAFTA and RTS Best Comedy Actor Awards. He won the 2010 BAFTA Television Award for Male Performance in a Comedy Role. He also won the 2010 British Comedy Award for Best TV Comedy Actor.

Capaldi was born in Glasgow. His mother's family was from Killeshandra, County Cavan, Ireland, and his father's family is from Picinisco, Italy. Capaldi was educated at St Teresa's Primary School in the city's Possilpark district, St Matthew's Primary School in Bishopbriggs and at St Ninian's High School, Kirkintilloch, before attending the Glasgow School of Art.

Capaldi has appeared in over forty films and television programmes since his appearance as Danny Oldsen in Local Hero (1983). He had a lead role in Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (1988) and in Stephen Frears' Dangerous Liaisons (1988). 

In 1995 Capaldi won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film for Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life, which was tied with fellow nominee Trevor thus leading to both films being announced as joint winners. 

He played Chief Petty Officer Grieves in the BBC Radio Ministry of Defence Comedy Our Brave Boys. His first starring role on television was as Luke Wakefield, a closet gay man who imagines he has witnessed a crime, in the BBC drama series Mr Wakefield's Crusade.

Capaldi played fictional Songs of Praise producer Tristan Campbell in two episodes of the sitcom Vicar of Dibley and a transvestite in ITV's Prime Suspect 3. In Channel 4's 1999 series "Psychos", he played a mathematician with bipolar disorder. He made an appearance in the hit sitcom Peep Show as a university professor, starred in Aftersun with Sarah Parish, and played a prime suspect in the 2007 series of Waking the Dead. In the Neil Gaiman gothic fantasy Neverwhere he portrayed the Angel Islington.

In 2007 Capaldi appeared as Mark Jenkins (Sid Jenkins' dad) in the E4 teen comedy/drama Skins where he returned for a second series in 2008 only to be killed off in the 3rd episode, and as characters in the Midsomer Murders episode "Death in Chorus" and ITV1's Fallen Angel. He also appeared in the British Comedy film Magicians.


Brian Cullingford was 87 - credited as Perkins in Fury From the Deep

Brian Cullingford  played Perkins in the 1968 Doctor Who story Fury from the Deep.

Also worked on Out of the UnknownZ CarsComedy PlayhouseThe Old Campaigner


Terrance Dicks (died 2019 aged 84) would have been 89 - 44 credits, including Script Editor for The Invasion

Terrance Dicks was best known for his work as Script Editor for the third Doctor's era and as the author of many of the Target novelisations of Doctor Who scripts.

He was born in East Ham, Essex, in 1935, the only son of his parents William and Nellie (Ambler). He studied English at Downing College, Cambridge, and did two years of National Service in the British Army. Following his discharge from the armed forces, he worked for five years as an advertising copywriter, and began writing radio play scripts for the BBC in his spare time.

His break in television came when his friend and mentor, Malcolm Hulke, asked for his help with the writing of an episode of the ABC (ITV) action-adventure series The Avengers, on which Dicks received a co-writer's credit on the broadcast. He also wrote for the ATV soap opera Crossroads.

In 1968 he was employed as the assistant script editor on Doctor Who. Dicks went on to become the main script editor on the programme the following year, and earned his first writing credit on the show when he and Hulke co-wrote the epic ten-part story The War Games which closed the sixth season and the era of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton. He had, however, been the uncredited co-writer of The Seeds of Death earlier in the season, after performing extensive work on writer Brian Hayles' original scripts.

Dicks went on to form a highly productive working relationship with incoming Doctor Who producer Barry Letts, working as the script editor on each of Letts' five seasons in charge of the programme from 1970 to 1974. After his departure, Dicks continued to be associated with the programme, writing four scripts for his successor as script editor Robert Holmes: Robot (1975, the opening story of Tom Baker's era as the Fourth Doctor), The Brain of Morbius, Horror of Fang Rock and State of Decay.

Dicks also contributed heavily to Target Books' range of novelisations of Doctor Who television stories, writing more than sixty of the titles published by the company over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, with many of his literary descriptions, such as the "wheezing, groaning" sound of the TARDIS materialising, entering Who lore. He served as unofficial editor of the Target Books line, in this role, he would attempt to enlist the original teleplay author to write the books whenever possible, but if they could not or would not, then Dicks would often end up writing the books himself. 

In 1980 Dicks returned to the Doctor Who fold when he wrote State of Decay for the eighteenth season. State of Decay was in fact a rewritten version of a story entitled The Vampire Mutation which had been due for production during season fifteen, but had been hastily withdrawn and replaced with Horror of Fang Rock when the BBC decided that its vampiric theme would clash with their high-profile adaptation of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, which was due for transmission at around the same time. Dicks made his final contribution to televised Doctor Who in 1983, when he wrote the ninety-minute twentieth anniversary special episode The Five Doctors.

During the early 1980s he worked again as script editor to Barry Letts' producer, this time on the BBC's esteemed Sunday Classics strand of period dramas and literary adaptations. When Letts departed the staff of the BBC in 1985, Dicks succeeded his colleague as the producer of the strand, overseeing productions such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Vanity Fair, before he himself left in 1988 and the Sunday Classics strand in that form came to an end.

During the 1990s, Dicks contributed to Virgin Publishing's line of full-length, officially-licensed original Doctor Who novels, the New Adventures, which carried on the story of the series following its cancellation as an ongoing television programme in 1989. Dicks wrote three Doctor Who novels for Virgin, and continued to write occasionally for the franchise following the take-over of the books licence by BBC Books in 1997. He wrote the first of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, The Eight Doctors, which was for a time the best-selling original Doctor Who novel. His book World Game, featuring the Second Doctor is set during "Season 6B", a period derived from fan theories. His most recent contributions to the range are the "Quick Reads" books Made of Steel and Revenge of the Judoon, both featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones.

Other work has included two Doctor Who stage plays (Doctor Who and the Daleks in the Seven Keys to Doomsday (1974) and Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure (1989)); co-creating and writing for the short-lived BBC science-fiction series Moonbase 3 (1973) and contributing to the ITV science-fiction series Space: 1999. He also wrote an audio drama for Big Finish Productions called "Comeback", which was the first to predominantly feature former companion Sarah Jane Smith. That story was released in August 2002.

In 1976, Dicks wrote a trilogy of books published by Target Books called "The Mounties" about a recruit in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. These were followed in 1979-1983 by another Target trilogy "Star Quest", which were later reprinted by Big Finish Productions.

Starting in 1978, Dicks began a series called "The Baker Street Irregulars" which eventually ran to ten books, the last being published in 1987. In 1981, Dicks also began a series of six children's horror novels with "Cry Vampire", coinciding with his novelisation of the Doctor Who serial State of Decay in which vampires also featured heavily.

1987 saw Dicks start a new series of books for very young children called "T. R. Bear", amounting to a further seven books. These were followed by the "Sally Ann" series about a determined ragdoll, "Magnificent Max" about a cat and "The Adventures of Goliath" about a golden retriever. The Goliath series is Dicks' largest amounting to eighteen books. Another five books about a St. Bernard dog made up the "Harvey" series.

"Jonathan's Ghost" and three sequels were published in 1988, and the three book "MacMagic" series followed in 1990. "The Littlest Dinosaur" was published in 1993 and "The Littlest on Guard" in 1994. Other works published in 1994 include "Woof! the Never Ending Tale", the "Cold Blood" series (four books), the "Chronicles of a Computer Game Addict" (four books).

Between 1998 and 2000 Dicks produced the three novel "Changing Universe" series. Since then, Dicks has been engaged in the ongoing "The Unexplained" series with twelve books so far.

As well as the vast number of fictional works, Dicks has also written several non-fiction books for children including "Europe United", "A Riot of Writers", "Uproar in the House", "A Right Royal History" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ghastly".

He married his wife Elsa in 1963 and they lived in Hampstead; they have three children, Stephen, Jonathan and and Oliver.

For a generation of fans growing up with his 'narration' of the Doctor's adventures, he will always be remembered fondly as "Uncle Terrance".

 

Note: many Internet sites (including ourselves) had his birthday originally listed as 10th May 1935 - Terrance has confirmed that it is indeed the 14th April. (with thanks to Andy Frankham-Allen)


Kenneth Cope (died 2024 aged 93) would have been 93 - credited as Packard in Warriors' Gate

Kenneth Cope is an English actor. He is most famous for his roles as Marty Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Jed Stone in Coronation Street and Ray Hilton in Brookside.

Career

He was most famous for his leading role in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969–1970) as the late private eye Marty Hopkirk opposite Mike Pratt's very much alive Jeff Randall. He had previously starred in Coronation Street as the shady Jed Stone (between 1961 and 1966, and in 2008), and had a regular role in the influential satirical series That Was The Week That Was (1962–1963). He also appeared in three episodes of Minder playing different characters, (Bury my Half at Waltham Green) as newly released prisoner Arthur Stubbs, 'Bring me the head of Arthur Daley' as Police Informer, Phelan, and as 'Scooter' in Waiting For Goddard. Cope's appearance in Coronation Street led to the recording of a novelty pop single "Hands Off, Stop Mucking About" with Tony Hatch. Although the song was not a hit it led to Cope being given a regular slot as a disc jockey with Radio Luxembourg.

He played Subutai in the 1965 film of the life of Genghis Khan, and in the same year appeared in Dateline Diamonds playing Lester Benson. He also took leading roles in two Carry On films. In Carry On at Your Convenience (1971) he played Vic Spanner, the obnoxious shop steward central to the film's trade union and industrial problems storyline and rival in the film's romantic sub-plot. In Carry On Matron (1972) he took the more sympathetic role of Cyril Carter, the son of a thief who is forced to impersonate a female nurse as part of his father's attempt to rob a maternity hospital. Once there Cyril finds love with a real nurse.

In 1971 he played Jack Victor in "The Wogle Stone", the sixth episode in the second season of Catweazle.

In 1975–76 he wrote three series of the BBC children's television series Striker, starring the young Kevin Moreton and inspired by the local youth football team in the village of Islip, Oxfordshire, where the Cope family was then living.

Cope later appeared in the Doctor Who story Warriors' Gate (in 1981), and guest starred in four episodes of Casualty, as well as taking roles in The Bill, Waking the Dead, A Touch of Frost, Minder and Kavanagh QC.

In 1984 Cope starred in an ill-conceived surreal sitcom about a failing themed cowboy village on the outskirts of Merseyside called Bootle Saddles. He played the lead character Percy James, who was passionate about the park despite the poor financial returns. The series appeared to be less of a parody but more a sort of homage to 1950s and '60s westerns, with episodes structured loosely around epics like High Noon and The Magnificent Seven. The characters rarely strayed out of their diegetic cowboy personas, despite the contemporary setting. The series was axed after one season.

In 1997 Cope played dodgy ex-copper Charlie Fairclough alongside David Jason in an episode of A Touch of Frost entitled "True Confessions."

From 1999 to 2002 he starred as Ray Hilton in the Channel Four soap opera Brookside.

He was offered a cameo role in the 2000-2001 revival of Randall and Hopkirk starring Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, but turned it down. He did, however, feature on the "Behind the Scenes" section of the Series 1 DVD, wishing the cast of the remake well. He also provided the foreword to a Randall and Hopkirk retrospective book (by Geoff Tibballs), published in 1994.

In 2008 Cope's Coronation Street character Jed Stone returned to the ITV soap after 42 years' absence, appearing as part of a storyline involving property developer Tony Gordon. The character was kept onscreen for several months before being written off yet again by show producers.

Cope now resides in Southport, and writes a weekly column for the weekly Visiter newspaper.

Personal life

Cope married actress Renny Lister, whom he had met when she worked on Coronation Street, in 1961. They have three children.

His daughter Martha Cope is also an actress. His sons Nick Cope and Mark Cope were members of the rock group the Candyskins.

Cope, who now suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, is still an avid supporter of Everton.

In January 2014 Cope appeared as a character witness during the trial of former Coronation Street colleague William Roache, who played Ken Barlow in the series.

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


Laidlaw Dalling (died 1982 aged 54) would have been 96 - credited as Rouvray in The Reign Of Terror

William Lucas (died 2016 aged 91) would have been 99 - credited as Range in Frontios

William Lucas is a British film and television actor

His first acting role was in the filmPortrait of Alison (1955), and later appeared in many Hammer Film Productions such as Shadow of the Cat. He is probably best known for his role in The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972�74) as Dr. James Gordon.

He played Range in the 1984 story Frontios, taking over from Peter Arne who was originaly cast, but who was murdered shortly before production on the story commenced.

More recently he has appeared in The BillLast of the Summer Wine and long-running ITV soap opera Coronation Street.

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


 Deaths
Murray Melvin (died 2023 aged 90) - 5 credits, including Bilis Manger in Captain Jack Harkness(TW)

Murray Melvin was an English stage and film actor.

The son of Hugh Victor Melvin and Maisie Winifred Driscoll, he was known for having created the role of Geoffrey in the Shelagh Delaney play, A Taste of Honey, which he also performed opposite Rita Tushingham in the 1961 film A Taste of Honey. In 1962 he won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance, and was also nominated for the BAFTA "Most Promising Newcomer" award.

Melvin joined Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company at the Theatre Royal Stratford East while still a student. In 1958, he appeared in productions of Brendan Behan's The Hostage. In 1963, he was in the original cast of Oh, What a Lovely War!.

He appeared in the very first episode of the cult television series The Avengers in 1960. Melvin's other film appearances have included roles in Alfie, and since 1964, regular appearances in the films of director Ken Russell, beginning with Diary of a Nobody and continuing withThe Devils (as the scheming, but ultimately deceived, Father Mignon), The Boy Friend and cameos inLisztomania and Prisoner of Honor. He had an important role as Reverend Samuel Runt in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975). He also appeared in Crossed Swords (1977) and the Italian mini-series Christopher Columbus (1985).

In 1998 he appeared in a Christmas Special episode of the BBC's Jonathan Creek called "The Black Canary".

In 2004 he appeared as Monsieur Reyer, the musical director and conductor of the Opera Populaire, in the film adaptation of the musical The Phantom of the Opera.

Melvin returned to the Theatre Royal as trustee and archivist and it is partly in this role that he is becoming widely known as a learned and popular film historian - he can be seen and heard, for example, on the BFI DVD release of the Bill Douglas Trilogy.

In 2007 he appeared as the sinister Bilis Manger in the Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood.

In July 2011 Murray Melvin played The Professor in a short comedy/drama called The Grey Mile, a story about two ex master criminals who are now confined to a care home. The film, written by Jonathan Parramint and Simon Janes, co-stars Paul Shane as Terry 'The Taxman' Tempest and Maggie Tulip as Miss Match. The film was shot on location at Wolterton Hall in Norfolk.

 

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

 


Pip Baker (died 2020 aged 91) - 4 credits, including Writer for The Mark of the Rani

Pip Baker is one half of the British writing team who wrote for Doctor Who in the 1980s.

A husband-and-wife writing team, Pip and Jane Baker wrote four serials for the programme: The Mark of the Rani, Parts 9-12 and 14 of The Trial of a Time Lord (aka Terror of the Vervoids and The Ultimate Foe) and Time and the Rani. They have also written a number of novelisations of the series.

They also wrote a Make your own adventure with Doctor Who (Find Your Fate with Doctor Who in the United States) gamebook entitled Race Against Time.

Prior to Doctor Who, they had written scripts for the 1970s Gerry Anderson science-fiction series Space: 1999 and the 1969 movie Captain Nemo and the Underwater City. In the 1990s they created and wrote the Children's BBC series Watt on Earth, concerning the eponymous alien Watt, who was stranded on this planet.