On 23 November 1963 – the day after the assassination of President John F Kennedy – the actor William Russell, who has died aged 99, appearing in a new BBC television series, approached what looked like an old-fashioned police box in a scrapyard, from which an old chap emerged, saying he was the doctor. Russell responded: “Doctor Who?”
And so was launched one of the most popular TV series of all time, although the viewing figures that night were low because of the political upheaval, so the same episode was shown again a week later. It caught on, big time, with Russell – as the science schoolteacher Ian Chesterton – and William Hartnell as the Doctor establishing themselves alongside Jacqueline Hill as the history teacher Barbara Wright and Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman.
