Daleks, the Beatles, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln and Queen Elizabeth I all featured in the same episode of Doctor Who today in 1965. It was The Executioners, the first instalment of The Chase, and they were all appearing on the Time Space Visualiser which the Doctor had obtained from the Morok space museum the week before.
In 1971 the eighth season approached its conclusion as The Daemons got underway. The Master was back yet again, this time posing as a rationalist existentialist priest, indeed!
The revived series decided to bring back the Silurians today in 2011, in The Hungry Earth. Rather than stay true to their original design, they were turned into sub-Star Trek lizard people. The third eye was omitted altogether. Apart from ripping off the plot of previous stories, it was pretty pointless bringing them back if they weren't going to do them justice. They should have just created a new protagonist.
Today we remember actor Jack Watling. He played Professor Edward Travers in the two Yeti / Great Intelligence stories during the Troughton era, coinciding with his daughter Debbie's portrayal of the Doctor's companion Victoria.
In The Abominable Snowmen he was playing the character around his own age - an initially unlikeable adventurer who almost got the Doctor killed when he thought him a member of a rival expedition. Just a few weeks later he was back in The Web of Fear, set decades later. Travers was now a grumpy old scientist, who was assisted by his daughter Anne.
It was originally intended that Travers and Anne would be back for The Invasion, but Watling was too busy, and the production team did not want to pay too much money to Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln who had created the characters (and with whom they had fallen out anyway over The Dominators). Only the Colonel played by Nicholas Courtney was brought back from the earlier story, and Travers and Anne were replaced by Prof. Watkins and his niece Isobel.
Watling did eventually reprise Travers in 1995 for the unofficial production Downtime, which was directed by Christopher Barry, and also starred Debbie Watling, Lis Sladen and Nicholas Courtney as their Doctor Who characters, up against the Great Intelligence and the Yeti once more.
Watling passed away in 2001, aged 78.
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