Doctor Who at 60: How the longest-running sci-fi show in history celebrated its milestones

Doctor Who's 60th anniversary took place on Thursday, 23 November with the show celebrating via a run of three special episodes featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate returning as the Doctor and Donna Noble.

But how has the programme marked its other birthdays? We turn the clock back to remember Doctor Who’s previous anniversaries…

Doctor Who's 10th anniversary | 1973

Birthday episodes of TV shows were a rare thing in the 1970s, but then few programmes in 1973 had as long a past as Doctor Who. So when The Three Doctors aired between 30 December 1972 and 20 January 1973 it was considered such a watercooler moment that it made the front cover of the Radio Times.

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Though the story — which united then-current Doc Jon Pertwee with his two predecessors through some timey-wimey jiggery-pokery (William Hartnell was in declining health, so was pre-filmed and appeared only via the TARDIS monitor) — was part of Doctor Who’s 10th season, it was, somewhat bizarrely, screened a full 10 months before the show’s actual birthday.

More on time — released bang on target in November ‘73 — was Radio Times’ Doctor Who 10th anniversary special, a lavish 68-page collectors edition giving fans a complete guide to the series’ first decade on screen, alongside a specially-written short story, We Are The Daleks! by Dalek creator Terry Nation.

Doctor Who's 20th anniversary | 1983

Following the precedent set by 1972-’73’s The Three Doctors, 1983 delivered us The Five Doctors, an ambitious 90-minute special that — on the face of it — collected together all five TV Doctors, but in actual fact united only three of them.

Read more: Doctor Who's wilderness years: How fans kept the flame alive after it was cancelled in 1989

Due to William Hartnell having died in 1976, the role of the First Doctor was taken by doppelganger Richard Hurndall, while Tom Baker, who’d relinquished the part just two and a half years before, bailed on the project, with his duplet of scenes lifted from 1979’s unfinished (and unbroadcast) Shada.

Baker was also, quite naturally, absent from the episode’s photocall, though that didn’t stop producer John Nathan-Turner from — rather cheekily — borrowing Madame Tussauds’ waxwork of the Fourth Doctor to stand alongside Richard Hurndall, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison.

Earlier in ‘83, over a chilly Easter weekend, the BBC had staged a 20th anniversary convention at Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire.

10,000 were expected – 35,000 turned up, eager to clock eyes on all four surviving Doctors (yes, even Tom was there) and a host of companions, as well as a multitude of props, from Cybermen and Daleks to the TARDIS console room itself.

As fan and future new series writer Paul Cornell recalled of the event: “It was our Woodstock.”

Doctor Who's 25th anniversary | 1988

There was no multi-Doctor story to celebrate its quarter century milestone in 1988. Instead a bog-standard three-parter was screened as part of the show’s 25th season, with its title Silver Nemesis a sly reference to the show’s first 25 years on air.

Eagle-eyed viewers might have spotted various ex-cast and crew members (including Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart actor Nicholas Courtney) as extras, but otherwise this 25th anniversary story was disappointingly light on nostalgia.

Doctor Who's 30th anniversary | 1993

Doctor Who had been off air for nearly four years by the time of the series’ pearl anniversary, yet still the BBC was keen to lay out the bunting.

The centrepiece was to have been a brand new episode, a multi-Doctor story titled The Dark Dimension, to be released on home video only. After a few weeks of pre-production, however, the project was canned, as it became clear that the budget far exceeded what BBC Enterprises was able to stump up.

Instead, fans got a booby prize in the shape of Dimensions in Time, a toe-curling 14-minute Doctor Who-EastEnders mashup that aired as part of that year’s Children in Need. More warmly welcomed was a documentary, 30 Years in the TARDIS, which closed with then-Controller of BBC One Alan Yentob teasing that the BBC were indeed in talks to bring the show back…

Doctor Who's 40th anniversary | 2003

Sadly, despite Alan Yentob’s wink-wink utterances at the end of 30 Years in the TARDIS, Doctor Who never did come back as an on-going series (a one-off 1996 TV movie tanked in the States, scuppering plans for a proper revival), and so when fans marked the 40th anniversary in 2003, few thought the show would ever come back.

The Beeb weren’t in much of a celebratory mood this time round, leaving the festivities to rival channels such as UK Gold who ran a whole weekend of documentaries and repeats, titled Doctor Who @40.

Additionally, Big Finish, the company who’d won the licence to produce audio Doctor Who adventures in 1999, produced their own 40th anniversary story, titled Zagreus, featuring appearances from Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison and even the late Jon Pertwee, using recordings of the actor taken from a 1991 fan-film.

Doctor Who's 50th anniversary | 2013

Not even the most optimistic fan of 2003 could have predicted how extravagant the celebrations for Doctor Who’s 50th would be. Of course, having the show back on air was the crucial difference, with the anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, as much a salute to the revived programme as its classic ‘63-’89 run.

Read more: Everything to know about the Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials

Coupling David Tennant’s Doctor with the then-current Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, it was a suitably cinematic 77-minute epic (it even had a cinema release) that even found time for an enigmatic cameo from Tom Baker as ‘the Curator’.

If The Day of the Doctor was the pièce de résistance of the 50th, the nadir was Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty, a comically ramshackle BBC show presented by Zoe Ball, peppered with technical glitches and iffy editorial choices, such as booking One Direction, only for the hosts to discover that the band knew virtually nothing about Doctor Who.

Even showrunner Steven Moffat could be glimpsed with his head in his hands.

Much more successful was An Adventure in Space and Time, a feature-length drama from the pen of Mark Gatiss about the beginnings of the show, starring David Bradley as William Hartnell and Jessica Raine as Doctor Who’s first producer, Verity Lambert.

And, in a blissful blast of magical realism, even Matt Smith turned up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him-cameo as Bradley’s character has a vision of Doctor Who’s future.

There was more nostalgia with The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, a red button-only comedy short, written and directed by Peter Davison that followed some of the older TV Doctors as they attempt to involve themselves in the making of The Day of the Doctor.

Read more: Doctor Who: Unleashed: Everything we know about the spin-off docuseries

Featuring cameos from David Tennant, John Barrowman, Steven Moffat, Sean Pertwee, Peter Jackson and Olivia Colman, it was one of the more unexpected joys of that month’s festivities, which also included a huge fan convention at the ExCel centre which united Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Matt Smith on stage for a Q&A.

Doctor Who's 60th anniversary | 2023

Doctor Who will be marking its 60th with a hotly-anticipated run of three specials bringing back one of the revived show’s most beloved couplings in David Tennant and Catherine Tate.

Not much else is known about the three Russell T Davies-penned episodes, except that one of them features the return of the Toymaker, a villain not seen since 1966 (Michael Gough then, Neil Patrick Harris now) and that Jemma Redgrave features once more as UNIT head Kate Lethbridge-Stewart.

Davies has teased there’ll be many other surprises, as yet unglimpsed in any of the trailers or publicity pics. Will Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler make an appearance? Can Doctor Who make it through its 60th without the Daleks exterminating anyone?

And will we see any past Doctors helping out David Tennant’s newly-regenerated Time Lord? Time, as ever with the world’s longest-running science fiction show, will tell.

Elsewhere, the BBC has announced that on 1 November, iPlayer will welcome the biggest collection of Doctor Who to the platform, with hundreds of episodes (over 800 episodes dating right back to 1963) becoming available with multiple accessibility features for the first time.

An extensive online archive will also be made available to fans with everything from interviews with cast to written documents, long unheard audio, and behind-the-scenes photos at bbc.co.uk/doctorwho.

The Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials start on Saturday, 25 November 2023 on BBC One and iPlayer and continue on 2 and 9 December.

Watch David Tennant celebrating the show's 59th birthday