Doctor Who Doctor's nature, somewhere between the twelfth and final incarnation. On rare occasions, other actors have stood in for the lead. In "The Five Doctors", Richard Hurndall played the First Doctor due to William Hartnell's death in 1975; 34 years later David Bradley similarly replaced Hartnell in "Twice Upon a Time". In "Time and the Rani", Sylvester McCoy briefly played the Sixth Doctor during the regeneration sequence, carrying on as the Seventh. For more information, see the list of actors who have played the Doctor. In other media, the Doctor has been played by various other actors, including Peter Cushing in
Doctor Who in Canada and the United States CBC did not renew the program and it would not reappear on the network for 40 years. The BBC series was originally sold to television stations in the United States in 1972, with Time-Life Television syndicating selected episodes of Jon Pertwee's time as the Doctor. The series did not do well, despite an interesting write-up some years earlier in "TV Guide". Apparently, program directors of the commercial television stations that picked up the Jon Pertwee series did not know that the program was an episodic serial, and so it was constantly being shuffled about in the programming schedules. In 1978,