Howard Da Silva
Howard Da Silva (4 May 1909[1][2]-16 February 1986[3]) was an American actor who provided linking narration for North American broadcasts of Doctor Who.
Specifically, he provided continuity announcements for episodes from season 12 through season 15, to set up episodes for which viewers may have missed due to the nature of commercial TV syndication — in similar fashion and tongue-in-cheek style such as William Dozier had performed in the 1960s Batman TV show. Howard Da Silva's Doctor Who introductions accompanied the earliest runs as broadcast on American commercial and PBS stations during the 1970s and early 1980s. However, these voice-overs tended to be rather intrusive — sometimes obscuring on-screen dialogue or giving away yet-to-be-revealed plot twists. Typically, after Doctor Who had been run on a public television station for a while, the linking narration was replaced with unedited BBC versions of the episodes. Nevertheless, the announcements were so familiar a part of some viewers' experience of Doctor Who that they became a standard extra feature on BBC DVD Region 1 releases of early Tom Baker serials. These were produced and edited by PBS producer, TJ Lubinsky from his personal library of Howard Da Silva versions from his years of collecting them from various TV stations that showed these tapes.
Da Silva was not known for professional voice-announcing. Rather, he was known as a successful and prolific character actor who appeared in over sixty films. However, his career hit a slide after he was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for his alleged communist associations. In the 1950s, he turned to Broadway to make his living, but returned to several television and movie roles in the late 1960s and 1970s. His major film comeback was his role as Benjamin Franklin, in the stage and film adaptation of the musical 1776.
