1953

Doctor Who Universe

June

• 01-02 - Queen Elizabeth II is crowned at Westminster in London, an event the Wire attempts to exploit by absorbing the identities of everyone watching the event on live television. The Doctor stops and traps her. (DW: The Idiot's Lantern) No one in the Welsh village of Llanfer Ceiriog has a television, so the townsfolk travel by bus to Doctor Snape's house in Gwydyr to watch it on his set. (NA: Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark)

December

• 18 - The airplane Sky Gypsy vanishes. It actually time travels to 2007. (TW: Out of Time)

Unknown dates

• Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, based on the witch trials at Salem Village, is written. The Doctor and his companions will see a production of the play in Bristol the following year. (PDA: The Witch Hunters)
• Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart begins his military career. (DW: Mawdryn Undead)
• The BBC television series Nightshade starring Edmund Trevithick as the title character is first broadcast. It ultimately runs for five years and is rebroadcast on BBC2 in 1968 (NA: Nightshade)
• A spacecraft carrying Rivesh Mantilax, on a mission to rescue his wife, Seruba Velak, is shot down over Area 51 in the United States. He is rescued by a group of Native Americans led by Night Eagle and kept hidden from American authorities for the next five years (DW: Dreamland).

Real World

July

• 18 - The Quatermass Experiment, written by Nigel Kneale, the first of the Quatermass television plays, debuts on BBC Television. Many of the ideas and situations in the serial were later used in Doctor Who. Quatermass himself arguably exists in the Doctor Who Universe.

1952

20th century 1950s

1954