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 Australia were still only around twelve months behind their original BBC transmission dates. In October 1966 the first episode of "The Space Museum" marked the first time the ABC stripped Doctor Who in the 6:30 Monday–Thursday timeslot. With only occasional changes or minor variations to days and times, the ABC continued to strip "Doctor Who" in a weekday early-evening timeslot for much of the next twenty-six years. Later in 1966 the ABC also started showing repeats of chunks of the most recent first-run stories in the same stripped prime-time slot. (Repeats not only remained commonplace, but their regularity also went on