Richard Franklin

Richard Kimber Franklin (15 January 1936-25 December 2023^[1]) played Captain Mike Yates on Doctor Who from Terror of the Autons to Planet of the Spiders. He reprised the role for the twentieth-anniversary special The Five Doctors (albeit only as a phantom image) and the thirtieth-anniversary adventure Dimensions in Time. Franklin also wrote The Killing Stone, a spin-off novel featuring Mike Yates and released as a BBV audio book.

Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]

Franklin left a career in advertising to join the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1963. Soon afterward he began his first professional work as an actor with the Century Theatre. His first television role was in an episode of Dixon of Dock Green. Afterwards, he appeared as a photographer and a guard in The Fiction-Makers, a two-part episode of The Saint which were later edited together into a film. He also worked for eighteen months as a member of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

After a run on the popular drama series, Crossroads, Franklin made his first appearance as Mike Yates in the 1971 Doctor Who story Terror of the Autons. For the next three seasons of the series' run, he made semi-regular appearances as the dashing young officer, a member of United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. Though he only appeared in nine stories, the character became immensely popular with fans. While on Doctor Who, he also appeared in episodes of From a Bird's Eye View and The Pathfinders.

After making his final regular Doctor Who appearance in Planet of the Spiders, Franklin mainly appeared on stage and made no television appearances until a small role in Blake's 7 in 1980. He was then invited back for a cameo appearance in the 1983 twentieth anniversary episode, The Five Doctors.

In 1984, Franklin appeared in the TV movie Waving to a Train. That same year, he also wrote and directed a sketch, Recall UNIT: The Great Tea-Bag Mystery, in which members of the old troop were brought back into action to search for a shrunken Margaret Thatcher. It also starred John Levene and Nicholas Courtney. There was another gap in his career until 1988, when he gained a regular role as Denis Rigg in soap opera Emmerdale, alongside Frazer Hines. He appeared in thirty five episodes until 1989.

Franklin returned to Doctor Who again in 1993 for Dimensions in Time, a skit televised on the BBC as part of its Children in Need charity drive. It brought past cast members from the show together in an adventure which also featured cameos by members of the cast of EastEnders.

In the 1990s, Franklin made guest appearances in Harry and Heartbeat. In 1997, Franklin ran unsuccessfully as a member of the Referendum Party for Hackney South/Shoreditch in the General Election. The Referendum Party opposes UK membership in the European Union. Franklin's entry into politics and his association with a party perceived by some as radical was something of a surprise to his fans. In 2005 he ran for Hove as a member of the Silent Majority Party and was again unsuccessful.

In the 2000s, Franklin mostly made appearances only in short films, but made an appearance in the films Feedback and Chemical Wedding. He also had a small role as an engineer in the 2016 Star Wars film Rogue One. He reprised the role of Mike Yates opposite Tom Baker for the 2009 AudioGO series Hornets' Nest and the 2010 series Demon Quest. He has also voiced Yates in several Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories, and also for The Horror of Flat Holm for Doctor Who Infinity in 2019.