Transmat:Doctor Who

The Mind of Evil

File:Mind of Evil - Doctor Who DVD

The Mind of Evil was a Third Doctor story that brought a radical change in the way United Nations Intelligence Taskforce was portrayed. Instead of being a primarily investigative body interested in alien or unexplained phenomena, here UNIT was mostly seen as a simple security force, guaranteeing the safety of international diplomats. In other words, the "United Nations" portion of their acronym was stressed over the "Intelligence Taskforce" bit — as would later happen in such stories as Day of the Daleks and The Time Warrior. Meanwhile, the main plot about the mind-control device was something writer Don Houghton intentionally included as an homage to A Clockwork Orange. Evil went badly over budget, thanks in no small part to one of Doctor Who's rare usages of a real helicopter in the concluding episode. An unimpressed Barry Letts therefore withdrew director Timothy Combe from his informal "director's rota", and Combe never worked on the programme again.

Jane Tranter was an important advocate for the return of Doctor Who to BBC One in the early 2000s.

Donald Baverstock was the BBC executive who set the the wheels in motion that eventually led to the creation of Doctor Who. Essentially the original commissioner of the programme, he hired Sydney Newman and later imposed a sense of financial responsibility upon producer Verity Lambert.

The Quantel Paintbox was a graphics workstation that allowed Doctor Who to have a primitive form of colour grading in the 1980s.

John Cleese appeared in Doctor Who's highest rated televised story, City of Death, around the time of series 2 of Fawlty Towers.

The careers of the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors are significantly longer in audio than on television.

Officially, only The Lodger (TV story) has been explicitly adapted from The Lodger a comic strip. However, several stories have clearly taken material from comic strips — often those in Doctor Who Magazine. The Shakespeare Code contains a good amount of material from A Groatsworth of Wit, and the notion of the Doctor absorbing the time vortex in order to spare a companion was explored in both The Parting of the Ways and The Flood.

Today in production history

• 1967 - Episode three of The Ice Warriors was recorded at Lime Grove Studios D. (TCH 11)
• 1969 - Location filming for Spearhead from Space took place. (REF: Doctor Who The Handbook: The Third Doctor)
• 1976 - Pre-filming for The Robots of Death took place at Ealing Studios. (REF: Doctor Who The Handbook: The Fourth Doctor)
• 1979 - Studio filming for Shada took place at BBC Television Centre studio 3. (REF: Doctor Who The Handbook: The Fourth Doctor)
• 2005 - Big Finish's Sarah Jane Smith audio story Snow Blind was recorded at the Moat Studios.
• 2009 - Big Finish's audio adaptation of the unproduced TV story Point of Entry was recorded at the Moat Studios.
• 2019
  • Big Finish's audio anthology Thin Time / Madquake was recorded at the Moat Studios.
  • Big Finish's audio adaptation of Revenge of the Cybermen's original storyline was recorded at Audio Sorcery.
• 2023 - The #DoctorDonnathon event took place at the Genesis Chamber.

Today's releases

• 1967
  • Episode six of The Abominable Snowmen premiered on BBC1.
  • Part two of the TV Comic story The Faithful Rocket Pack was published.
• 1972 - Part two of the TV Action comic story Steelfist was published.
• 1978 - Part two The Stones of Blood premiered on BBC1.
• 1981 - "The Forest of Fear" was repeated on BBC2.
• 1989 - The Incredible Hulk Presents comic story Technical Hitch was published.
• 2002 - The Infinity Race was published by BBC Books.
• 2009 - DWDVDF 22 was published by GE Fabbri Ltd.
• 2010
  • A Shard of Ice were released by AudioGO.
  • A Town Called Fortune was released by Big Finish Productions.
  • DWA 191 was published by BBC Magazines.
• 2014 - The Story of Fester Cat was published by The Berkley Publishing Group.
• 2015
  • The Ninth Doctor #5, The Eighth Doctor #1 and The Eleventh Doctor Year Two #2 were published by Titan Comics.
  • TCH 71 was published by Hachette Partworks.
• 2016 - Toby Hadoke's Who's Round 192 was released online.
• 2018 - The Tsuranga Conundrum premiered on BBC One.
• 2019 - Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Reeltime Pictures.
• 2020 - Blue Boxes was released by Big Finish.
• 2021 - K9 Audio Annual and The Time Travel Collection were released by BBC Audio.
• 2022 - Origins was published by Titan Comics.

Today's births and deaths

• 1971 - Actor Robyn Moore was born.
• 1982 - Actor Talfryn Thomas died.
• 1998 - Actor Bear McCausland was born.
• 2017 - Composer Dudley Simpson died.