Out of this world anniversary specials
At 5.15pm on November 23, 1963, a TV legend was born, but in rather inauspicious circumstances.
The broadcast took place on the BBC (there was only one channel back then – BBC2 didn’t launch until April 1964), a day after the assassination of US President John F Kennedy, and as a result, nobody was really paying that much attention to the arrival on screens of a whitehaired old gent who claimed he could travel through space and time in a police box that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, found in a junkyard at 76 Totter’s Lane in urban London.
But, just a few weeks later, it was regarded as a phenomenon thanks to the debut appearance of the Daleks, who are now regarded as the Doctor’s most iconic enemy, helping turn the show into a massive hit that ran until 1989 before taking a break. A TV movie failed to inspire a new series in 1996, and fans had to wait another nine years for Russell T Davies’s revamp to turn the show into must-see TV again.
Now, Doctor Who (Saturday, BBC1, 6.30pm) is celebrating its 60th anniversary with three special editions featuring the return of David Tennant and Catherine Tate as the Time Lord and his companion Donna Noble; they’ve really got viewers
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excited, particularly as the episodes also mark the return of Davies as showrunner, and he isn’t letting on how and why the characters are able to return. “Maybe this is a missing story. Or a parallel world,” teases the multi-award-winning writer. “Or a dream, or a trick, or a flashback... The only thing I can confirm is that it’s going to be spectacular, as two of our greatest stars reunite for the battle of a lifetime.” The episodes will be shown on consecutive Saturday evenings, beginning with The Star Beast, in which the Doctor comes face-toface with Donna once again. He was forced to erase her memory to save her life in her previous episode, so it should be interesting to find out how they get around that. Listen out too for Miriam Margolyes, who provides the voice of a creature known as Meep, while Yasmin Finney joins the cast as Donna’s daughter Rose.
Star Beast will be followed by Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle. The latter guest stars Neil Patrick Harris (who also popped up briefly in Davies’s wonderful It’s a Sin in 2021) as classic villain The Toymaker, who was last seen on screen in 1966, when he was played by Michael Gough.