Tuesday 23 August 2022

On This Day... 23rd August


The first Doctor Who-ish movie opened in cinemas across the UK today in 1965. Dr. Who & The Daleks starred Peter Cushing as a human inventor named Dr. Who. Another big difference was that Barbara (Jennie Linden) was one of his grand-daughters, with Ian Chesterton (Roy Castle) her boyfriend. He was there mainly for comic relief. Susan was the much younger Roberta Tovey, who would be the only co-star to make it onto the second movie a year later.
On the same day that audiences could first see the Daleks in colour on the big screen, William Hartnell was nominating his favourite pieces of music on Desert Island Discs (on BBC Radio 4).
In 2014 the Peter Capaldi era got underway with Deep Breath. This also offered the first glimpse of Michelle Gomez's Missy, though we didn't know that at the time.


Today we remember producer Innes Lloyd, who successfully steered the programme through the first regeneration of the programme's lead actor. He died in 1991, aged 65.
Lloyd took over from John Wiles, who had only been in post a relatively short time. He was quite open about his dislike for science fiction. He formed an uneasy partnership with script editor Gerry Davis and together they got rid of the purely historical stories and introduced the base-under-siege format. The first of these was The Tenth Planet, which saw the debut appearance of Cybermen and the final regular appearance of William Hartnell, replaced by Patrick Troughton. Lloyd was also responsible for bringing Frazer Hines onto the programme as a regular. Davis left and was replaced by Peter Bryant, who was then groomed to take over from Lloyd. His final story as producer was The Enemy of the World, though Bryant was handling most of the day to day business by this time.
Lloyd went on to produce a number of award-winning collaborations with Alan Bennett - Talking Heads, An Englishman Abroad, and A Question of Attribution.

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