This November brings two important 50th anniversaries. One of those anniversaries commemorates an event that went unnoticed in the US at the time, the debut of the British science-fiction program Doctor Who. I’ll talk about that anniversary another time. The program wouldn’t make a big splash over here until the late 1970’s, but even if it had been scheduled to debut in the US at the same time as in the UK, it wouldn’t have. Its debut would have been postponed because of the news coverage of the other big event from November 1963. I am referring, of course, to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

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