Today In DOCTOR WHO History: October 31st

It's Them!

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.

October 31st
Spooky! It's Halloween, and part one of Planet of Giants graced our screens on this very day in 1964 at 5:13pm when it was watched by 8.4 million viewers. It's one of only two episodes of Doctor Who that have received their premiere broadcast on October 31st throughout the show's long history, and as there was a huge gap of 51 years between them viewers would have to wait until 2015 when the seventh episode of the ninth series of Doctor Who arrived on their screens. That episode saw the Twelfth Doctor face The Zygon Invasion, which was watched by 3.87 million viewers overnight in the UK. After seven days of timeshifting the final figure rose to 5.76 million viewers.

Spin-Offs
Er, sort of a spin-off. More "Related Programming" I guess? Either way the first episode of the Australian atrocity K-9, titled Regeneration, received its UK premiere on October 31st 2009 on the Disney XD channel (over in Australia, it was held back to April 3rd 2010 and aired before Matt Smith's debut adventure The Eleventh Hour - with this as a lead in I bet that damaged ratings). The guy's face on the left says it all really, doesn't it? I mean, look at that thing! It's like one of the really naff Cybermen upgrades.

Before his "regeneration" the model of K-9 that is seen early in this episode is identical to the original models used on Doctor Who, but of course the series is nothing at all to do with the BBC (mind you, they greenlit Class so...) rather it came from a licensing deal with K-9 creator Bob Baker. Baker confirmed that it is meant to be K-9 Mark I (who was last seen on screen remaining on Gallifrey with Leela at the conclusion of The Invasion Of Time), implying that the original robotic dog survived the Last Great Time War. Although I doubt that's at all canon.

Never fear, even though 26 episodes of K-9 were produced (26! Lord be.) we shan't mention this series again in these quarters. 

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