Today In DOCTOR WHO History: July 24th

Look out, Beadle's about!

Welcome to our daily round-up of the Doctor Who episodes which received their premiere broadcast on this day throughout the show's long history, along with anything else of note that may have taken place. You can click on any red text to read our full retrospectives/reviews for that episode, and note that all viewing figures listed are for UK broadcasts (unless otherwise stated).

July 24th
Welcome to another day in Doctor Who history, and thankfully there's actually an episode of the show which received its debut broadcast on July 24th. It happened all the way back in 1965 when a young Jeremy Beadle was already pranking the public. Whilst the Monk went off to say his prayers, Jeremy shrunk his TARDIS with hilarious results - what's a renegade Time Lord to do, eh? The whole thing was caught on camera, and inserted into the narrative of episode 4 of The Time Meddler.

Er, possibly.

Checkmate was the individual title, and it closed out the second season of Doctor Who, with 8.3 million viewers now not knowing what to do with their Saturdays for the next two months.

You might not know but the version of this episode of The Time Meddler which is available today, although the same as the one broadcast all those years ago, is missing 12 seconds of footage as it was removed before broadcast by censors. The 2008 Region 2 DVD release includes as an extra, called The Missing 12 Seconds, which includes the audio for this missing sequence with original script excerpts and explanatory text. The 12 seconds contained an act of violence deemed too strong for Saturday tea-time viewing, the visuals would have depicted two Vikings run through by the sword-wielding Saxons via the use of dummies.



Related Programming
On July 24th 2010 the Doctor Who Prom premiered on BBC Radio 3 in 2010 at 7:30pm (Broadcast on BBC Three in an edited form at a later date - Sep 6th 2010 to be exact). The concert was hosted by Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, and featured a mix of music from Doctor Who and classical music, plus special character appearances and a sketch with Matt in character as the Doctor.

Join us again tomorrow for another round-up of the episodes broadcast, the spin-offs, the special events, the birthday's celebrated and anything else of note that went down on this day in Doctor Who history.