10 Doctor Who Episodes That Were Banned Or Censored
1. The Deadly Assassin
The ending of The Deadly Assassin Part Three is an iconic moment in Doctor Who history, not least because of all the fuss that surrounded it.
As originally broadcast on 13 November 1976, the episode included a freeze-frame cliffhanger with the Doctor's head being held underwater by Goth.
Along with all the other dark and violent content in the story, this watery conclusion attracted the ire of activist Mary Whitehouse, who successfully cajoled the BBC into editing the master tape of Episode Three and deleting the cliffhanger altogether.
Whitehouse allegedly quoted a young boy who had said that he would similarly hold his brother's head underwater the next time they got in an argument.
With the BBC no longer possessing a complete, unedited version of the original broadcast, the image of the Doctor drowning was restored using off-air home video recordings – though curiously, the "Whitehouse cut" is the version that currently exists on iPlayer.
It's difficult to see what all the fuss was about today, though you can imagine that in the more quaint TV landscape of the 1970s, leaving children for a whole week on the image of the Doctor essentially being waterboarded would court some controversy.
Thank god Mary Whitehouse wasn't around to see Torchwood, crikey.