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).
December 28th
After a couple of days of quiet output, this is more like it! No less than four classic episodes and the very first Doctor Who spin-off have premiered on December 28th, including the first proper appearance of the Daleks which took place on this day in 1963 during episode 2 of The Daleks (entitled The Survivors). 6.0 million viewers watched the pepper-pots shuffle onto screen and begin their assault on 1960s British culture.
Five years later and 9 million people tuned in to see the Second Doctor beginning a new adventure with The Krotons.
Tom Baker was briefly seen at the end of Planet Of The Spiders, but his time as the Fourth Doctor began for real on this day in 1974 when 10.8 million viewers tuned in to part one of Robot.
One more classic Doctor Who story from this day, and it comes from the Seventh Doctor. Part three of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the penultimate episode of season 25, was broadcast in 1988 and watched by 4.8 million viewers.
The big event for this day, depending on how you look at it (obviously not in a quality measurement) occurred in 1981 when the first ever Doctor Who spin-off premiered on British TV. After axing the robot dog from the main series, the then-producer of Doctor Who, John Nathan-Turner, threw him a bone in the shape of K-9 and Company. The single episode called A Girl's Best Friend attracted a healthy audience of 8.4 million viewers, all of them stuck with this god-awful earworm of a theme going round their head into new year 1982...
Please! Make it stop!!
Although the supposedly pilot episode received very good ratings, it was not well received critically, hence the whole idea was quietly put to sleep.
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.
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