Actor and voice artiste Peter Tuddenham has died at the age of 88 after a short illness.

His vocal talents were used in Doctor Who for The Ark in Space, The Masque of Mandragora and Time and the Rani, but he will also be well-known to cult TV fans for providing the voices of Zen, Orac and Slave in Blake's 7, which was created by Terry Nation.

In addition, Tuddenham was in the Kaldor City audio spin-offs Occam's Razor and Death's Head, which were Doctor Who/Blake's 7 crossovers produced by Magic Bullet.

(Thanks to David and Lesley McIntee.)

Character actor George Sewell, who played Ratcliffe in Remembrance of the Daleks, has died at the age of 82. He was also well-known to cult TV fans as Colonel Alec Freeman in the Gerry Anderson series UFO. The Daily Telegraph has an obituary.

In addition, John Gill, who played Oak in Fury From The Deep, has died aged 94, and Elaine Ives-Cameron, who was Martha in The Stones of Blood and Ms Lavish/Estella in the Big Finish audio The Stones of Venice, has also passed away. Her date of birth is unknown.

(Thanks to Kenneth Parker, "Scifiradioguy", and Neil Marsh.)

The actor Gareth Hunt, who played Arak in Jon Pertwee's regeneration story Planet of the Spiders in 1974, died of pancreatic cancer today at home in Redhill, Surrey. He was 65.

Hunt was probably most famous for the role of Mike Gambit in The New Avengers in the 1970s. He also took part in a long-running Nescafe coffee advert campaign on TV.

Among his many other roles, he played the footman Frederick Norton in Upstairs, Downstairs, which was co-created by Jean Marsh, Pertwee's former wife who played companion character Sara Kingdom in The Daleks' Masterplan.

Click here for his career summary from Funky Beetroot Celebrity Management Ltd.

Reported at BBC News, The Times and the Daily Mirror, with obituaries at telegraph.co.uk and timesonline, the latter of which (at the time of posting this) mistakenly says his Doctor Who role was in 1963.

Click here for a BBC picture gallery of aspects of Hunt's career, which includes an image from Planet of the Spiders.

Actor Derek Waring who played Shardovan in Castrovalva died of cancer yesterday at 79.

He was also well-known for his roles in Z Cars and Moody and Pegg.

Other TV shows Waring appeared in were The Professionals, Dixon of Dock Green and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, which starred William Russell - later to become Doctor Whocompanion Ian Chesterton - in the title role.

More details of Waring's life and career are online at Yahoo News.

UPDATE (22 Feb): His death has subsequently been reported at BBC News, where there is also a detailed biography plus tribute. The Guardian carries an obituary.

Pictured below is Waring in character in Castrovalva, which was recently released on DVD in the UK as part of the New Beginnings box set. Click on the image for a larger version.

Doctor Who author Craig Hinton, a longtime contributor to the Virgin and BBC Books novel lines and Big Finish's audio ranges, has died. He was 42.

Hinton first became known for his articles about various sci-fi television programmes, including Doctor Who and Star Trek. He was also for a time editor of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society's journal Celestial Toyroom. This work brought him to the attention of the editor of Doctor Who Magazine, who offered him the role of reviewing merchandise for the magazine's Shelf Life section. It was whilst writing for the magazine that Hinton had his first novel, The Crystal Bucephalus, published as part of Virgin Publishing's Missing Adventures range. The book - which Hinton often referred to as "The Crystal Bucket" - was originally submitted for Virgin's New Adventures, and 50,000 words of this version were written before the change was made.

This novel was followed by a further Missing Adventure, Millennial Rites in 1995, and then by Hinton's only New Adventure in 1996, GodEngine, which featured the Ice Warriors as well as oblique appearances by the Daleks.

Following Virgin's loss of their licence to produce Doctor Who novels, Hinton began submitting proposals to BBC Booksand in 2001 they published his novel The Quantum Archangel as part of their Past Doctor Adventures range. This was followed in 2004 by the novel Synthespians, which again had started life as a proposal for the current incumbent Doctor before being altered to feature a previous Doctor. Synthespians also came into difficulties when an image of the television show Dynasty was used on the cover: the cover's creators had arranged for permission to use the copyrighted image, but had neglected to arrange permission to alter it, and so at the last minute a replacement cover had to be produced. It is this that appeared on the cover of the novel.

Hinton also wrote for Big Finish, with the Doctor Who audio play Excelis Decays being produced in 2002 and theTomorrow People play The Lords of Forever in 2005. He also contributed short stories to a variety of Big Finish's short fiction collections.

Hinton spoke often of having coined the term "fanwank" in some of his past reviews to refer to novels or stories that relied heavily on past continuity. Ironically, the term would often be applied to Hinton's own work, which frequently incorporated a great deal of Doctor Who history; Hinton himself embraced the label.

His most recent published work consisted of reviews of the 2006 Doctor Who episodes, published in Second Flight: Back to the Vortex II by Outpost Gallifrey's editor Shaun Lyon. Hinton formed part of the international panel of reviewers giving their thoughts on each episode for the book, which was released less than a fortnight before his death. At the time of his death, Hinton was working with co-writer Chris McKeon on a project called Time's Champion, a novel based on a former BBC Books submission of his which would have explained the circumstances surrounding the Sixth Doctor's regeneration. Hinton intended to publish the completed project online, and McKeon intends to complete the work in memory of Hinton and make it available to fans.

Hinton, an active and popular member of the Doctor Who fan community since the 1980s, was a regular poster on the Outpost Gallifrey forum since its inception in 2001. A memorial thread has been opened on the forum to leave tributes and share memories.

Outpost Gallifrey would like to offer its sincere condolences to all of Hinton's family and friends.

(Some details sourced from Wikipedia; additional reporting by Paul Hayes & Arnold T. Blumberg. Photograph is of Craig from the Gallifrey 2005 convention.)

Peter Barkworth, who played Clent in The Ice Warriors (1967), has died at the age of 77. Barkworth also played Stephen in the Get Off My Cloud episode of the BBC sci-fi anthology series Out Of The Unknown, which featured the Tardis and a Dalek and aired in 1969.

He was probably most famous for the role of banker Mark Telford in the 1979 BBC serial Telford's Change, which co-starred Hannah Gordon, who played Kirsty inThe Highlanders in 1966/67. Barkworth left RADA the same year as his Ice Warriorsco-star Peter Sallis, who played Penley.

The cause of death was given as bronchopneumonia following a stroke. He died on 21 October in London. The story is reported at BBC News; The Times and The Guardian have obituaries.

Peter Bryant, former Doctor Who producer and script editor who guided the series through much of the Patrick Troughton era of the series, died on Friday May 19, according to a post by fan Ian Levine on the Restoration Team forum. Bryant joined the series with the story "The Faceless Ones" as associate producer under Innes Lloyd, then produced the serial "Tomb of the Cybermen" before becoming script editor for three series during the show's fifth season. He became the series producer again with "The Web of Fear" and did so through Troughton's penultimate story, "The Space Pirates," when he left the position and was replaced by Derrick Sherwin. Once married to actress Shirley Cooklin ("The Tomb of the Cybermen"), he had remarried and is survived by one of two children, his daughter, and several grandchildren.

Update: The official Doctor Who website also just posted an announcement about this, stating, "Born in 1923, Peter began his career as an actor, appearing in roles as diverse as a 1953 adaptation of Wuthering Heights (as Edgar Linton) and as the cheerful elder son Jack in the BBC's first soap opera The Grove Family. He later became an announcer for BBC radio, also producing scripts for radio drama and eventually becoming the Head of the Drama Script Unit. ... After leaving Doctor Who, he moved on to produce several other TV programmes, including Paul Temple and Special Project Air, before becoming an Actors' and Writers' agent."

Gary Downie, former production manager on the classic Doctor Who series and the partner of late series producer John Nathan-Turner, died this morning after a long battle with cancer, according to a friend of Downie's as told to the Doctor Who Restoration Team. Downie, a popular guest at conventions for years with Nathan-Turner, also worked on several other series including "Star Cops" and "All Creatures Great and Small". (Photo courtesy Mark Withall/Cult TV)