The actor John Hurt has died at the age of 77.

John Hurt, the man who played the missing regeneration of the Doctor, the War Doctor, was one of the most respected actors of his generation. Over a 50 year career, he played some of the most memorable characters in British Film and television, dominating the profession with his rich voice entrancing audiences. His career earnt him two Academy Award nominations, a Golden Globe Award, as well as four BAFTA Awards.

John Hurt was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire on 22nd January 1940. He trained at the Grimsby Art School, before winning a scholarship allowing him to study at Saint Martin's School of Art in London. In 1960, he won a scholarship to RADA, where he trained for two years.

His first film was The Wild and the Willing but he made his mark in Fred Zinnemann's A Man for All Seasons playing Richard Rich. His portrayal of Timothy Evans, in 10 Rillington Place, the true story of an innocent man hanged for murder, earnt him his first BAFTA nomination.

He won a BAFTA playing Quentin Crisp in the TV play The Naked Civil Servant, produced by ex-Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert, a role he would reprise in the 2009 film An Englishman in New York. He won further plaudits in the 1976 series I Claudius playing the psychotic Roman emperor Caligula.

In 1978 he won his first Acadamy nomination for Midnight Express, losing out to Christopher Walken, but for which he won a Golden Globe and a second BAFTA. His unique voice graced the animated films Watership Down and Lord of the Rings. In 1980 he played John Merrick in The Elephant Man earning him his second Acadamy nomination. The same year he came to a gruesome end as Kane in Alien, and four years later he played Winston Smith in the film adaptation of the Orwell classic set in that year Nineteen Eighty-Four.

He had roles in the Harry Potter films and the Merlin TV series and played the MP Alan Clark in The Alan Clark Diaries. Hurt recently starred in Oscar-nominated biopic of President John F. Kennedy's widow, Jackie, which is currently showing in cinemas.

In 2013, at the age of 73 he made his debut in Doctor Who, playing The War Doctor, a character invented by show-runner Steven Moffat to fill the gap in the series 50th Anniversary story, The Day of the Doctor, when it became apparent that Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston did not wish to take part.

Moffat later told Radio Times Hurt accepted the offer almost immediately, giving him a place in the series history as one of the rare breed of actor to have played The Doctor. Hurt would return to the role for Big Finish in 2015

In 2015 Hurt received a knighthood from Her Majesty The Queen for services to drama, to add to the CBE he received in 2004.

John Hurt was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2015 but was later given the all clear. In an interview last year he said he had no fear of death. John Hurt was married four times. He is survived by his wife of 12 years Anwen Rees-Myers, and his two sons Alexander and Nicholas.

We have a pair of tickets up for grabs for the TV Utopia convention which takes place on the weekend 20th-22nd January, courtesy of organisers Fantom Films. To be in with a chance to win the tickets, simply answer the following question:


Please send your answers along with your name, address and where you heard about the competition (news site, news app, other website, etc.) to comp-fantom@doctorwhonews.net with the subject "Tuning In". The competition is open to UK readers only, closing date 13th January 2017. Only one entry per household will be accepted.

The Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, had an official rating of 7.83 million viewers, according to data released by BARB.

The rating is over 2 million higher than the initial overnight figure and includes all those who recorded the programme and watched it within 7 days. The figure is slightly higher than the 2015 Special, The Husbands of River Song, which has 7.69 million watching.

Doctor Who finished 9th for the week.

Viewing across the board was slightly down on last year, with Call the Midwife topping the list with 9.21 million watching. Mrs Brown's Boys, Strictly Come Dancing and The Christmas Bake Off all rated highly. BBC One dominated the top of the chart meaning ITV only managed to get Coronation Street into the Top Ten. The annual Christmas message from The Queen was shown simultaneously on BBC One, ITV 1, and Sky 1, giving it a total rating of 8.76 million.

Against Doctor Who, Emmerdale had 6.21 million watching, while on Channel 4, the film Home Alone had 3.19 million. BBC Two was showing a repeat of The Morecambe and Wise Show which had 2 million watching and on Sky1 The Last Dragonslayer had 0.72 million.

Since the series returned in 2005 there have been twelve Christmas day episodes, the most successful being the 2007 episode starring Kylie Minogue, Voyage of the Damned.



The late night, signed repeat of The Return of Doctor Mysterio, shown at 2.30am Friday Morning, had an overnight estimate of 0.061 million watching.

Veteran comedian Ken Dodd has been knighted in the Queen's New Year's Honours list.

The Liverpool legend is best known for his sixty-year-long career as a music hall style entertainer but has made a few forays into drama, one notable appearance playing the Tollmaster in the 1987 Seventh Doctor story Delta and the Bannermen.

The comedian has been a staple of the British Comedy circuit since the 1950's, and still, at the age of 89, continues to tour the UK with his Happiness Show.

He has had 19 UK Top 40 hits including the song Tears, which topped the UK charts for five weeks in 1965 and remains one of the UK's biggest selling singles of all time.

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Also Honoured

The actor Tim Pigott-Smith, who is made an OBE.
Tim Pigott-Smith acted in two Doctor Who stories. He played Captain Harker in the Third Doctor story The Claws of Axos, returning in 1976 in the Fourth Doctor story The Masque of Mandragora, where he played Marco. His most well known Television role was as Ronald Merrick in ITV series The Jewel in the Crown. He has had a long and distinguished Radio and Stage career.

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The actress Helen McCrory, who is made an OBE.
Helen McCrory played Rosanna in the Tenth Doctor story The Vampires of Venice. On film she portrayed Cherie Blair the 2006 film The Queen and portrayed Narcissa Malfoy in the final three Harry Potter films. She also plays Polly Gray in Peaky Blinders.

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The actor Clive Rowe who is made an MBE.
Clive Rowe played Morvin Van Hoff in the 2007 Christmas special Voyage of the Damned. He is best known for his role as Norman Ellington in BBC Children's drama The Story of Tracy Beaker and has appeared in Disney show The Evermore Chronicles.

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The cartoonist Peter Brookes who is made an CBE.
Peter Brookes was the main artist producing covers for the Target range of Doctor Who books in the mid 1970's. His most well know covers include The Green Death and Planet of the Spiders. He has worked for Radio Times, The New Statesman and The Spectator. He has recently worked on a notable series of cartoons known as the "Westminster Academy", which depicted Nick Clegg as a public school fag to a red cheeked David Cameron, who was portrayed as a prefect dressed in a Eton suit. He depicted leader of the opposition Ed Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls as Wallace and Gromit

Penguin have launched a new competition which gives fans a chance to have their artwork featured in a new Doctor Who Book.

Doctor Who: The Illustrated Adventures is due to be published by Puffin at the end of 2017. The publishers are looking for images to illustrate the 100 top favourite Doctor Who episodes, as listed in the book.

The images have to be submited using the Template on the Penguin website and the winners will be chosen by the Puffin design and illustration experts and members of the BBC’s Doctor Who brand team.

At least 25 winners will be chosen to appear in the book, but dependent on the number and quality of entries, as many as 100 images could be chosen. Winners who will be the entrants whose entries, in the opinion of the judges, depict (or capture) the chosen episode of Doctor Who most creatively and attractively. Each winner will receive two copies of the book.

Full details can be found on the Penguin Website

List of Top 100 Doctor Who Episodes to be featured in the book.

Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio had an Audience Appreciation or AI score of 82.

The Appreciation Index or AI is a measure of how much the audience enjoyed the programme. The score, out of a hundred, is compiled by a specially selected panel of around 5,000 people who go online and rate and comment on programmes.

The score is identical to that received by last year's Christmas Special The Husbands of River Song.

The highest score of the evening once more went to Call the Midwife on BBC One which scored 88.

This item contains spoilers.

Press reaction to this year's Christmas Special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, is overwealmingly positive with most reviewers enjoying the first new Doctor Who to hit screens this year.

"The happiest, most heroic Christmas special in years" is is how The Telegraph describes the episode with much praise going to the lead actors. "Capaldi was charismatically mercurial, switching between silliness and sadness. Nardole, who could have been a mere stop-gap until new companion Bill arrives next year, worked well as an affable comic stooge – with the added ability to put his finger on the painful truth of the Doctor’s loneliness and grief"

Praise for the actors was also abundant in Radio Times who called the episode "a beautifully packaged hour of uplifting escapism". "The scenes between the Doctor and eight-year-old Grant (Logan Hoffman) are delightful, allowing Capaldi to work some grandfatherly charm and tottering eccentricity. Canadian actor Justin Chatwin looks great as both the lackadaisical nanny and rippling Ghost, while Britain’s Charity Wakefield is lovely as his Lois-Lane-alike".

A charming and funny festive special is how Digital Spy heralds the story, with much praise for the script by showrunner Steven Moffat. "It's one of the most richly comic episodes in recent memory, employing witty wordplay, great sight gags and even a joke about Pokémon Go."

The script also wins plaudits from the Los Angeles Times. "The episode plays very much to Moffat’s strengths. He has a talent for fast-paced farce, with characters going in and out of doors and portals in space and time —the episode’s central engine, the difficulties of managing a secret identity, is a classic situation-comedy situation — and for crafting banter of both the light and glancing kind and of the kind that intimates deeper feelings below."

The Guardian appreciated the move away from the traditional, overly Christmas type of episode. "There are only scant, functional references to Christmas in The Return of Doctor Mysterio. Rather, it channels the classic 3.10pm movie of yore – specifically, the Richard Donner/Christopher Reeve Superman films. And for that, it ranks in my personal top five of Christmas Doctor Whos."

GamesRadar feels the episode sets the right tone from the start. "The pre-titles sequence is a charmer, establishing the wry, buoyant tone. Logan Hoffman’s winning as the young, comic-crazed Grant Gordon while the Doctor’s sniffy take on superheroes is good value, particularly the sly line where he wonders if Spider-Man’s radiation-imbued superpowers are “vomiting, hair loss, death”. That’s dark for Christmas."

Cartermatt enjoyed the comedy in the story. "Everything that we saw between The Ghost and Lucy was ridiculous, but also incredibly funny. The exchange where he was going to reveal his secret identity to her while she realized how amazing Grant was to her was amazing, especially when he chickened out of making the move when he realized that she admired Grant’s “honesty.”"

IGN is less enthusiastic about the story calling it an OK return for the Doctor. "Its most effective moments land with the few brief times when it connects to that tale or the Doctor’s past, with the rest of the superhero-themed segment feeling slightly detached and less relevant"

AV Club is also less impressed "On balance, The Return Of Doctor Mysterio is just about fine. It’s probably a lesser episode than The Husbands Of River Song, but it also has a better sense of its overall purpose than that episode did, which careened from cartoonish to tragic with minimal warning."

Nerdist appreciated the central theme of the episode. "The Return of Doctor Mysterio is exactly the kind of adventure story we need for a Christmas Day. It tells us we don’t need superpowers or a mask and cape to be heroic, and that the bravest thing you can do is speak your mind and stand up to the bullies of this world. That’s what Doctor Who is, and I for one have badly needed it."

Finally, Den of Geek was impressed by the directing. "Visually, director Ed Bazalgette is immediately on board with the style of the piece. His comic book-into-real-life opening was quite lovely, but also there’s the segment where he splits the screen. This is an old Hitchcock trick, of course, but when the Doctor starts to edge over the line of his split, then the comics aesthetic clearly came to mind too."

Our own review of the episode can be found in Doctor Who Reviews

The Christmas Special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, had an estimated audience of 5.68 million viewers on BBC One, a share of 27.1% of the total TV audience, according to unofficial overnigfht figures.

Top of the tree this year was the Christmas edition of Strictly Come Dancing which had 7.17 million viewers, followed by The Great Christmas Bake Off with 6.23 million. Later in the evening Mrs Brown's Christmas Boys, which has topped the ratings in recent years, scored 6.13 million. The drama Call the Midwife had 6.06 million while soap EastEnders had 5.9 million.

ITV's highest rated programme was Coronation Street with 6.12 million. The Queen's Christmas Message had 5.19 million watching on BBC One and 2.95 million on ITV.

The overnight figures are an initial estimate. Final figures, including those who record the programme and watch within a week, will be released early next week.

Today sees the premiere of the Doctor's only adventure for 2016, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, which takes its now traditional spot in the BBC One Christmas Day television line-up. There's still time to enter our competition to predict the ratings of this festive episode - details below!

At the time of writing, there's six hours to go before Doctor Who is broadcast in the United Kingdom, but in the meantime the BBC have released a wealth of videos to promote the episode:

Predict the Ratings Competition

It's time for our 'legendary' Predict the Ratings competition, which this year will give readers the chance to win The Return of Doctor Mysterio on DVD/Bluray upon its release, plus a copy of the BBC Book The Whoniverse by Justin Richards and George Mann.


The ratings and positions for 2014 and 2015 are presented here for comparison - recent years have seen a decline in television viewing over Christmas Day, with none of the programmes achieving the heady heights of several years ago.

To enter our competition, please send the following details to comp-ratings@doctorwhonews.net:

• Your name and preferred email address
• Your country of entry (full details will be requested only if you are the winner)
• Your guess at the final viewing figure to the nearest 10,000 (eg.9.99m)
• Your guess at the final position in the chart (eg. 1st) - this will only be used in the event of a tie-break

Terms and Conditions:

• The competition closes at 08:30 GMT, 26th December 2016.
• Only one entry will be accepted per person.
• The competition is open worldwide.
• BARB final figures are expected in early 2016; we will contact the winner once they have been published.

BBC Worldwide have released details on the forthcoming Blu-ray/DVD release of this year's Christmas Special, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, in the United Kingdom:


The Return of Doctor Mysterio is available to pre-order on DVD or Blu-ray from our Amazon Shop, and there is still time to win a copy in our Predict The Ratings competition!