Today In DOCTOR WHO History: August 22nd

The First Doctor is considering a change of identity.

Click on any red text to read our full retrospectives/reviews for that episode. All viewing figures are for UK premiere broadcasts unless otherwise stated.

August 22nd
Welcome to our daily round-up of all things Doctor Who, and although it's a quiet day there is at least one episode which received its premiere broadcast on August 22nd, and with Autumn just around the corner the Who-drought caused by the Summer schedules is very soon going to come to an end.

Standby then for a torrent of Who in this daily column, but first let's pay tribute to the orginal, you might say, as we remember the 1964 pure historical adventure The Reign Of Terror. Episode 3 of the six part story was titled A Change of Identity and was broadcast at 5:29pm to an audience of 6.9 million viewers.

Part three is one of the episodes that remains in the BBC archives (sadly parts 4 & 5 are missing believed wiped). Written by Dennis Spooner and directed by Hungarian Henric Hirsch, this episode sees Barbara and Susan saved from the guillotine by two royalists, Jules and Jean. Susan then falls ill, mimicking a real life event by director Hirsch. He'd found production on the serial to be incredibly stressful, clashing multiple times with William Hartnell - partly to do with Hirsch's inexperience as a director, but also, sadly, partly to do with him being a "foreigner" (sigh).

Hirsch eventually collapsed through stress during filming of this episode, with producer Verity Lambert placing the production assistant Timothy Combe in charge until a replacement director could be found for the remainder of the serial. Although BBC documentation indicates that John Gorrie, director of The Keys of Marinus, oversaw production of the third episode, Gorrie himself has no memory of the event.

Following discussions with Combe, Hartnell became more understanding towards Hirsch's situation and he returned to direct the final three episodes, splitting some of the workload with Combe. Whoever was behind the camera for episode three of The Reign Of Terror, John Gorrie or Timothy Combe, neither were credited, as Henric Hirsch is the sole name on all six episodes.

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.