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 4th
Part two of Planet of Evil gets things underway on this bumper day in Doctor Who history and our regular round-up of all the episodes which received their debut broadcast. Arriving on your televisual screens for the fist time on Saturday October 4th 1975 at 5:46pm, the Fourth Doctor adventure was watched by 9.9 million viewers, more than double the audience of part two of Meglos, which premiered just five years later to 4.2 million.
A decade later in 1986, the Sixth Doctor was still facing The Trial Of A Time Lord. The installment broadcast on this day, part five, was episode one of Mindwarp and was watched by 4.8 million viewers.
Heading North of the border for the Scottish Doctor's section of the day. First up it's back to 1989 and part one of Ghost Light, which saw the Seventh Doctor take Ace and 4.2 million viewers to Gabriel Chase. And then we have the Twelfth Doctor with an overweight moon, a big arachnid problem which turns out to not be an arachnid problem and something to do with dragons & eggs or something like that - Kill The Moon basically. A story which on its premiere broadcast of 8.30pm, Saturday October 4th 2014, was watched by 6.91 million viewers.
Spin-Offs
Also on this mammoth day in Doctor Who history we have episode two of The Sarah Jane Adventures story Sky. A strange episode, following the frustrations of Sarah Jane and her Bannerman Road chums when their satellite TV reception suddenly disappears and they have to wait in for ages for the repairman to come but he never does, turning up eventually on another day when Sarah Jane had to pop to the Co-op for some milk and so then had to rearrange the appointment but was told as she wasn't in there would be an additional £45 charge levied to her bill, at which point she just decided to cancel her Sky TV subscription anyway as there wasn't really anything she wanted to watch anymore. I think that was the synopsis, right? Possibly not, but either way the episode was broadcast in 2011 at 5:20pm, and it was watched by 0.53 million viewers who may well remember it better than I.
Related Programming
We go back to the bescrafed one now as on this day in 1976 school children up and down the country were tuning into part 3 of Exploration Earth. The BBC Schools radio series formed part of a study module about geography, and was broadcast in weekly installments at 2pm every Monday. This week it used the Doctor Who format and elements to explore the processes of the creation of the Earth, with the TARDIS taking the Fourth Doctor and Sarah back in time to witness stages of the Earth's development.
The subtitle The Time Machine was never actually spoken on-air but was used in Radio Times listings and teacher's guides. Along with Doctor Who and the Pescatons, this rarity marks one of only two occasions on which Elisabeth Sladen appeared alongside Tom Baker in a Doctor Who audio play.
Many years later, in 2001, Exploration Earth: The Time Machine was released on CD, paired with Genesis of the Daleks. It was also given away on its own as a free CD with the 28th April 2010 edition of The Daily Telegraph newspaper via WHSmith, which was sadly just one week after Elisabeth Sladen passed away. Sad face.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment