On This Day... 12th November

Another busy day for Doctor Who and all its spin-offs.

First of all, back in 1966, we had the second episode of The Power of the Daleks, whilst in 1977 Image of the Fendahl had reached its third instalment.

Torchwood's first season gave us Small Worlds today in 2006.

The Sarah Jane Adventures reached the end of its first season with the opening part of The Lost Boy, screened in 2007. In 2009, the third season story Mona Lisa's Revenge had its first episode aired.

Finally, in 2016, we had Brave-ish Heart, the latest episode of Class.

Back in 1993, as part of the (very low key) 30th Anniversary celebrations, The Planet of the Daleks was being repeated on Friday evenings on BBC2. After each episode a short extra programme was shown. Today's was The Antique Doctor Who Show, where people had brought items to be valued by experts. These included the inevitable toy Daleks and K9s, as well as an original script for "Doctor Who and Tanni" - which eventually became The Rescue. When it came to Part Three they had to broadcast the B&W version of the episode. The accompanying short was a documentary about missing episodes. Part Six was followed by a UNIT Recruitment film. The phone number which was shown as part of this took you to a recorded message informing you that The Green Death was about to start a repeat run on Sunday mornings, starting that weekend, again on BBC2.

This time of year was good for repeats. Exactly 40 years ago "The Five Faces of Doctor Who" season was in progress - comprising An Unearthly Child, The Krotons, The Three Doctors, Carnival of Monsters and Logopolis. It had originally been intended that The Masque of Mandragora might be shown to represent Tom Baker - but they had to go with Logopolis in order to include Peter Davison in the line-up as the Fifth of the Five Faces. The stories had to be four-parters, as the season only ran Mondays to Thursdays for the five weeks.