On This Day... 8th December

The second episode of Enemy of the Bane was broadcast today in 2008, bringing the second season of The Sarah Jane Adventures to a close. More significantly, this was the final on screen appearance by Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier. It had been hoped that he might have appeared in the parent programme one more time, alongside David Tennant's Tenth Doctor, but ill health prevented this. When UNIT featured, the Brigadier was stuck in Peru, rather than Geneva.

Meanwhile, in 1979, Nightmare of Eden reached its third episode.

Today we  remember Michael Craze, who played Ben Jackson, companion to the First and Second Doctors. He died today in 1998, at the age of 56, following a fall. The Doctor Who theme was played at his funeral.

Ben was introduced alongside Anneke Wills' Polly in 1966's The War Machines, to be representative of modern, contemporary Swinging Sixties' characters. They did not get on well with William Hartnell, but only had to work with him on three stories (and he was absent for large parts of these). They got on much better with Patrick Troughton. Craze was unhappy when Frazer Hines joined the TARDIS team as Jamie, as initially he had to give up lines and plot involvement to him. Producer Innes Lloyd favoured Hines and grew cold on Ben and Polly. Wills was invited to stay on, but Craze was to be written out at the end of the second episode of The Evil of the Daleks. Wills decided to show solidarity and leave as well, also fearing typecasting. Ben and Polly were written out early, during The Faceless Ones. They featured only in the first two episodes, plus the ending to Part Six, which had been filmed with Parts One and Two. They were paid up until their original planned departure week.

Craze appeared in a couple of low budget horror films in the 1970's (including one which also featured the original companion actor William Russell, screened on the Talking Pictures channel just the other week), but then gave up acting to run a pub. He was a popular guest on the convention circuit.

Craze's episodes are amongst the hardest hit when it comes to gaps in the archives (only 13 episodes of 36 survive), but recent animations have brought him, and his character Ben, to a whole new audience.