Nightshade (series)

Nightshade was a British science fiction television series broadcast by the BBC from 1953 to 1958. The series starred Edmund Trevithick as the titular Professor Nightshade and was rebroadcast on BBC Two in December 1968, shortly before Trevithick's death in Crook Marsham. (PROSE: Nightshade, The Left-Handed Hummingbird) James "Jimmy" Reynolds played Constable Chorley and William Jerrold played Staff Sergeant Ripper. Other characters in the show were Barbara Carson, Robert Carson and Dr Barclay. (PROSE: Nightshade)

Episodes of the TV series included In the Mouth of Darkness, The Horror from the Blizzard, Nightshade and the Imps and Cavern of the Kronos. (AUDIO: Nightshade) The show was popular enough at its height that some pubs would be nearly empty while the show was on. (PROSE: Prelude Nightshade)

As a boy, Thomas Edward Hawthorne was a big fan of the series. (AUDIO: Nightshade)

Emile Mars-Smith had a Professor Nightshade action figure. (PROSE: Deadfall)

The Eighth Doctor was a fan of the series, judging by the fact that he once told Dave Young that he had "never really rated TV science fiction since they got rid of Nightshade." (PROSE: Escape Velocity)

Sacker compared the escapades of Jago and Litefoot to an episode of this series, "only far less plausible". (AUDIO: The Final Act)

In 1995, Nightshade: The Motion Picture was playing at a cinema in Blackcastle. The Fourth Doctor decided to watch For the Love of Lassie instead. (COMIC: Star Beast II)

Within the Land of Fiction, Mel Joseph designed the official Nightshade board game. According to his fiancée Karen Davies, he did it "when there was that big “Nightshade” nostalgia thing, the videos and the books and the repeats and all that". (PROSE: Conundrum)

Behind the scenes
Author Mark Gatiss has stated that the fictional series was designed as a tribute to Quatermass, a BBC science fiction series of the 1950s which had a great influence on Doctor Who, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. Given the implication in both the television story Remembrance of the Daleks and the novel The Dying Days that the eponymous Bernard Quatermass is a real person in the Doctor Who universe, it is possible that Nightshade would in effect serve to replace Quatermass. If that were the case, it's similar to the relationship between Doctor Who and Professor X, though it should not be forgotten that the Doctor Who franchise also exists within the Doctor's universe.