As The Force Awakens fever grips the cosmos we take a look at the elements that bind the galaxies of Doctor Who and Star Wars together…

Any Doctor Who fan watching A New Hope back in 1977 would have recognised a few familiar names on the credits… Most obviously, Darth Vader was played by David Prowse who appeared as the Minotaur in The Time Monster and Peter Cushing – Dr. Who in the two 1960s Dalek movies – materialised on the Death Star as Grand Moff Tarkin.

A little further down the credits, eagle-eyed viewers might have spotted Don Henderson as General Tagge and Garrick Hagon as Biggs Darklighter… Henderson later played the villainous Gavrok in Delta and the Bannermen whilst decades later, Hagon wound up in the Wild West as Abraham in A Town Called Mercy.

Dozens of actors have appeared in both Doctor Who and the Star Wars franchise, which incidentally, sounds like a novel we want to read! High-profile actors spanning both worlds include Jeremy Bulloch as fan fave Boba Fett (Hal in The Time Warrior and Tor in The Space Museum), Julian Glover as General Veers in The Empire Strikes Back (Scaroth in City of Death and Richard in The Crusade) and Warwick Davis who appeared in both Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens (Porridge in Nightmare in Silver).

The episode that aired before the original release of Star Wars: A New Hope (The Talons of Weng Chiang, episode 6) featured Deep Roy as the ‘pig-faced, pig-brained Peking Homunculus’, Mr Sin. He later starred in Return of the Jedi and in 2009 played Keenser, the alien sidekick of Montgomery Scott, in Star Trek. In that outing, Scotty was played by Simon Pegg who cameoed in The Force Awakens and played the Editor in The Long Game.

If we cast our net a little wider and trawl though Star Wars sister shows we find David Tennant as Huyang in The Clone Wars, long after he’d defeated a bunch of other clones in The Poison Sky…

Star Wars may be a mega-phenomenon but it wasn’t directly referenced in Doctor Who until the final adventure in its original run, when Darth Vader was mentioned during 1989’s Survival. The allusions hardly came thick and fast after that although the Doctor mentioned Star Wars in both Dreamland and the minisode, Meanwhile in the TARDIS.

And finally, we enjoyed the cheeky little tip of the hat in the last series… In Before the Flood we glimpse the business card of Albar Prentis and see it bears the line, ‘May the remorse be with you’. Now, what does that remind us of..?