Howard Da Silva

Howard Da Silva (4 May 1909 -16 February 1986 ) was an American actor who provided linking narration for North American broadcasts of Doctor Who.

Specifically, he provided continuity announcements for episodes from season 12 through season 15, ostensibly to help North American audiences get acclimatized to the nature of serial storytelling, which was then uncommon on non-soap-operatic television in the United States and Canada. His narration accompanied the earliest runs of Doctor Who as broadcast on American PBS stations and Canadian broadcasters like TVOntario during the 1970s and early 1980s. However, these voice-overs tended to be rather intrusive — either obscuring on-screen dialogue or giving away yet-to-be-revealed plot twists. Typically, after Doctor Who had been run on a station for a while, the linking narration was removed as unnecessary. Nevertheless, the announcements were so familiar a part of some viewers' experience of Doctor Who that they became a standard extra feature on BBC DVD Region 1 releases of early Tom Baker serials.

Da Silva was not otherwise associated with professional announcing. Rather, he was a successful and prolific character actor who appeared in over sixty films. However, his career hit a slide after he was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for his alleged communist associations. In the 1950s, he turned to Broadway to make his living, but returned to several television and movie roles in the late 1960s and 1970s.