List of references to other DWU media in live-action BBC stories

Abslom Daak, a recurring character from the Doctor Who DWM comic stories, made an unexpected cameo in TV: Time Heist.

References to non-televised works in live-action BBC DWU stories can be few and far between, but over the years, writers have slipped in references to characters, places, and events which originated in media other than the parent show.

Although starting as early as the show's second season, with Terry Nation striving to maintain continuity between televised Dalek material and the Skarosian tyrants' solo appearances in printed media, this behaviour became more common with the advent of the 2005 series of the show, with writers having lived through, and even participated in the writing of, the novels, comics, and audio stories of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.

Doctor Who

Season 2

• The Dalek Invasion of Earth used the term "Dalekanium" to refer to the metal that comprises the casing of a Dalek. The term, spelled "Dalekenium", had first been used several months earlier in the comic The Humanoids in The Dalek Book. It would remain a frequently used term, both on television and in other media, through to the 21st century.

Season 4

• David Whitaker's The Evil of the Daleks marks the first televised appearance of the Dalek Emperor. Whitaker had previously co-written the first appearance of an emperor in the comic Invasion of the Daleks with fellow television writer Terry Nation, and later works would confirm the apparent (but not quite explicit) identity of the two Emperors, now purported both to be the Dalek Prime.

Season 10

• Frontier in Space featured a future Earth being ruled by a President of Earth. The title had first appeared in the DWU in a TV Century 21 short story, Battle in Space.
• The Dalek Supreme in Planet of the Daleks shares its black and gold colour scheme with the Dalek Leader from the comic strip *Sub Zero, which predated the serial by a year.

Season 12

• In Robot, Sarah Jane Smith berates Sergeant Benton after he chases off K1, prompting him to reply: "The US Cavalry never got treated like this." Sarah previously called for the US Cavalry to fend off the Daleks during the audio segments meant for the live performance at Goodwood Motor Circuit on 18 May 1974. Robot began airing in December of that year. (In the novelisation, the line is less specific: "The US Cavalry never get treated like this.")

Season 13

• The Brain of Morbius is set on Karn which first appeared in the stage play Doctor Who and the Daleks in Seven Keys to Doomsday.

Series 1

• A London double decker bus resembling Iris Wildthyme's Celestial Omnibus, the Number 22 to Putney Common, can be glimpsed in the opening scenes of Rose.
• The concept of a time war originated in the Doctor Who Magazine comic 4-D War, where Time Lords of the Dark Times fight in the Black Sun War. The concept would later become a major part of the War in Heaven of the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, before eventually finding its way onto television in the form of the Last Great Time War, initially mentioned in Rose.
• In the Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow, the Time Vortex is red when travelling forward in time and blue when travelling backwards. This idea was used again from Series 1 to 4 of the new series.
• UNIT officer Muriel Frost, who originated from the 1990 Doctor Who Magazine comic The Mark of Mandragora, appears in Aliens of London.
• Dalek is Robert Shearman's adaptation of his 2003 audio drama Jubilee. This fact is referenced by the Jubilee Pizza boxes seen in the story.
• Kronkburgers, first eaten by soldiers of an alternate Roman Empire in the Doctor Who Magazine comic Doctor Who and the Iron Legion, were sold on Satellite Five in The Long Game.
• In Boom Town, Rose Tyler recalls her visit to Justicia from the BBC New Series Adventures novel The Monsters Inside.
• In Bad Wolf, the Anne Droid asked Rose a question about the planet Lucifer, which first appeared in the Virgin New Adventures novel Lucifer Rising.
• In The Parting of the Ways, the Doctor claims that ancient Dalek legends refer to him as the "Oncoming Storm", a title that was first applied to him in the novels Love and War and Vampire Science. It would remain frequently used in subsequent years of televised and non-televised media alike.

Series 2

• The two-parter Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel is loosely based on the audio story Spare Parts, with Marc Platt being thanked in the end credits of the story.
• Army of Ghosts hinges on the existence of "the Void", being the space between universes. Although the "dimensional divide" was first referenced on television in Inferno, it was the DWM comic story Voyager which first described what lay beyond the Doctor's universe with the name of "the Void" — and, incidentally, the first story to attempt to depict it visually.
• Doomsday includes the first televised reference to rels, a Dalek measurement of time. A Dalek unit called a "rel" was created in 1964's The Dalek Dictionary, where it measured "hydro-electricity"; it was first depicted as a unit of time in the film Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., and had since appeared in comics and audios.

Series 3

• In Smith and Jones, the Doctor mentions that he used to have a brother. The character of Irving Braxiatel, first introduced in the Virgin New Adventures, had previously been established as the Doctor's brother.
• Gareth Roberts' The Shakespeare Code, is conceptually very similar to the comic story A Groatsworth of Wit, which was also written by Roberts and also featured William Shakespeare.
• Paul Cornell's two-parter Human Nature / The Family of Blood is an adaptation of his Virgin New Adventures novel Human Nature.
• Steven Moffat's Blink is an adaptation of the short story What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow, published two years earlier.

Series 4

• The Butler Institute, originally from the Virgin New Adventures novel Cat's Cradle: Warhead, was briefly seen in The Poison Sky.
• The Space Agency, first featured in the TV21 Dalek prose story Fireball Surrenders!, is mentioned in The Waters of Mars.
• Henrietta Goodheart from the novel Beautiful Chaos is mentioned as Netty, a member of the Silver Cloak, in The End of Time.

Series 5

• Victory of the Daleks and subsequent stories establish that the Doctor and Winston Churchill are old friends. Players in the BBC Past Doctor Adventures was actually the first story to depict the relationship in this way, and was reinforced by Churchill's cameo in The Shadow in the Glass.
• The Lodger is an adaptation of the Doctor Who Magazine comic of the same name.
• At the opening of the Pandorica in (the aptly named) The Pandorica Opens, the Alliance is mentioned as including Chelonians and Haemogoths. Chelonians originated in the Virgin New Adventures novel The Highest Science, while the Haemogoths had been mentioned in the BBC New Series Adventures novel The Forgotten Army, published a few months prior.

Series 6

• Professor Arthur Candy, who first appeared in Steven Moffat's Decalog 3: Consequences short story Continuity Errors, appears again in Moffat's television story Let's Kill Hitler. Furthermore, he meets River at Luna University, which was first mentioned in that story.
• In Night Terrors, the Doctor mentions Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday among the bedtime stories he knows. This references the stage play Doctor Who and the Daleks in Seven Keys to Doomsday, which was also later adapted into an audio story by Big Finish.

Series 7

• The Brig's daughter Kate Stewart, who first appeared in the 1995 home video Downtime, appears as a major recurring character in the series starting with The Power of Three.
• Before regenerating in The Night of the Doctor, the Eighth Doctor recalls some of his audio-original companions, including Charley, C'rizz, Lucie Miller, Tamsin Drew, and Molly O'Sullivan.
• The Day of the Doctor prominently featured the War Council of Gallifrey, first seen in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures as part of the War in Heaven.

Series 8

• In Into the Dalek, Clara Oswald is a teacher of Class 1C, which was identified as Barbara Wright's class number in the novelisation The Edge of Destruction.
• Abslom Daak, who first appeared in the Doctor Who Magazine comic Abslom Daak... Dalek Killer, was seen in the memories of the cyborg Psi in Time Heist.

Series 9

• In The Girl Who Died the Doctor mentions the Velosians, who had first been mentioned in the audio Starlight Robbery two years earlier. They went on to debut in Tales of the Dark Times in 2020.

Series 10

• When recalling the planets on which the Cybermen have originated in The Doctor Falls, the Twelfth Doctor mentions Marinus, which had been revealed as a Cyberman origin planet in the Doctor Who Magazine comic The World Shapers.

Series 12

• In The Timeless Children the actor for Rassilon was cast to resemble Don Warrington, who played Rassilon in the audio story Zagreus. Dialogue in the same scene suggests that the founders of Gallifrey knowingly restricted Time Lord regeneration to a maximum of twelve renewals, an idea first made explicit in Zagreus, albeit now attributed to Tecteun.

K9 and Company

• The particular model of K9 which features in A Girl's Best Friend, K9 Mark III, made his debut in Doctor Who Annual 1981 several months before the episode was broadcast. In the annual, he travelled in the TARDIS alongside the Fourth Doctor and Adric.

Torchwood

• After Freema Agyeman was cast in The Carrie Diaries, which featured a character called Samantha Jones, Torchwood script editor Gary Russell mentioned in a tweet that the alias used by Agyeman's character, Martha Jones, in the television story Reset, was a deliberate reference to the Eighth Doctor's companion Sam Jones.
• John Frobisher from Children of Earth was named after Frobisher, a Sixth Doctor companion in the Doctor Who Magazine comics. (REF: DWMSE 39)

The Sarah Jane Adventures

• The Raxacoricofallapatorian villains of the story The Gift, the Blathereen, first appeared in the BBC New Series Adventures novel The Monsters Inside.

Class

• The Coal Hill School Roll of Honours Board includes the names A. Okehurst, J. Gibson, and D. Hatcher, who all perished in the events of the Telos Doctor Who novella Time and Relative.

Mini-sodes

• In Liberty Hall, Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart mentions being with the Doctor in Malebolgia in 2003, which are references to the audio story Minuet in Hell. He also mentions Gordon and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, who are his family members in the independently produced Downtime.
• In Ian Chesterton: An Introduction, the home video reconstruction of The Crusade, Ian Chesterton recalls two untelevised adventures. The first involves the talking stones of Tyron, mentioned in the parent story's novelisation, Doctor Who and the Crusaders, and the second is his witnessing of the Salem witch trials, depicted in the BBC Past Doctor Adventures novel The Witch Hunters.