Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography

It was so embarrassing. No one could have cared less about this stranger staring back at them – I could have been the bag lady for all they knew. I just thought, No, Jon, people don’t want to know. Just take your bow and leave me alone!

The rest of the journey passed in a blur. I’d already heard too much so we chatted about the industry. He’d said it before but he repeated it then: ‘If I can do anything for you, Lissie, just ask.’ And he really meant it. Such a kind man, he really just wanted to help.

That was 10 May 1973. My first day in the studio was not until the 28th so I had a fortnight to really get to grips with the scripts and my character. I just prayed I’d be allowed to do so without interference.

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The filming sequence for Doctor Who back then was extremely regimented. But what did I expect when the whole place seemed to be filled with ex-military men? Serials in those days ran for four or six episodes, with the odd aberration. Episodes were recorded in pairs and for every pair we had ten days, working ten to five, to do everything: rehearse, technical rehearsal – where lights and camera positions etc. are worked out – costumes, record. It sounds a long time but actual filming hours were in extremely short supply. If we had a four- part serial, we filmed four days. Six days for a six-episode story. No time at all, when you think about it.

Rehearsals took place at the Acton Hilton in one of their vast rooms, working through each show sequentially as that’s how they would be filmed. I have to say, it was an exhilarating atmosphere. There was a great energy in the room – in the whole building, in fact – and the sense of creativity was almost tangible. The BBC in the 1970s was a tremendously fertile place to work. The talent on show was immense.

Of course there were the odd teething problems. Having joined the cast late and missed out on the table read- through, I’d gone up to Manchester cold, needing to make friends from scratch. A lot of the cast and crew hadn’t been required for the location scenes, of course, so now I had to be introduced as the new girl all over again.

I don’t like to bring up gender issues because there were as many women acting as men, and yet, I have the feeling that had I been a chap joining, there’d have been a tad more respect thrown my way. As it was, I was perceived as the latest in a long line of ditzy girls employed to scream ‘Doctor!’ every five minutes, which, I felt, was all that certain people wanted to see. No one apart from Barry and Jon really knew what I’d done in the past. All that went completely under the radar and assumptions were made about my ability – or lack of it. I remember later saying to one person who’d tried to position me for a scene rather than describing what he wanted, ‘Oi, hands off! I’m not a Dalek.’ Patronising really isn’t the word. (Actually, yes it is – it’s the perfect word.) Unfortunately this wasn’t something that disappeared with the first episode. A constant turnover of directors, crew and production personnel meant I repeatedly encountered new people who assumed I’d been hired from a modelling agency and not from a background of twenty-odd years, girl and woman, on the stage.

Fitting in back in London was a lot easier with Jon there to show me the ropes, although even that seems, on reflection, to be just another example of the casual sexism on the show at the time. He was almost giving me his blessing, like the thumbs-up he’d originally given Barry, but to some people that blessing counted for a lot.

Replacing an established character like Jo Grant was quite a hard nut to crack. I had to win over not only an audience used to watching Katy, but the actors accustomed to working with her. You get to know how your co-stars act after a while, you can predict their moves or mannerisms, and a certain shorthand creeps in, but all that disappears when a newbie turns up. Then it’s back to the drawing board for everyone.

Doctor Who in those days could be a bit of a boys’ club, I think it’s fair to say. A lot of my predecessors were written to be supplementary to the action. I needed to shoehorn Sarah Jane into the action as quickly and firmly as possible – and that had to start with the boys of UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, you know) who acted as Earth’s military response to the threat of extra-terrestrial invasion.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Captain Mike Yates and Sergeant Benton were a familiar, well, unit by the time I arrived. From what I gathered, Yates had had some romantic interest in Jo Grant. I didn’t want Sarah Jane to go down that route because it would disempower her but boyish flirting would be OK, as I demonstrated when the Doctor was ignoring me in Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

The only one of the triumvirate I met at Acton on my first day was the Brig, played so clinically by Nick Courtney. He’s a great thinker, is Nick, often off in his own world. Over the course of our time together I didn’t think I’d actually got to know him that well at all, so it was such an unexpected bonus when he joined us on The Sarah Jane Adventures for The Last Sontaran to discover just how much we knew about each other. When you’ve worked so closely you build up a joint history, shared memories. It was really moving to catch up and realise we both experienced the same things. I can only liken it to a band on tour or an army battalion in the field. When you return to everyday life there are things you can never share with anyone other than those you’ve served with. And that was what it was like seeing Nick again. Magical.

Jon and Nick were very tight but complete opposites. Where Jon was flamboyant, Nick was so reserved you’d think he really was military top brass. Jon loved trying to prick his veneer. Once we were doing a camera rehearse and he whispered, ‘Let’s try to make the Brig laugh.’

So just as Nick was running through his lines, we took position next to the camera, both still in our blue makeup capes and Jon with a mop on his head. The crew were falling about. Nick just carried on as normal.

‘What’s everyone laughing at?’

It wasn’t Nick’s fault that we weren’t close at the time. When I was looking to chat to someone I instinctively gravitated towards wardrobe and makeup. If ever I went missing, that’s where you could usually find me, tea in hand, gossiping, and away from the spotlight.

For the last couple of scheduled days at North Acton, we had an audience. All the technicians, the producers, the effects guys and cameramen came in for a technical rehearsal. These were the people who had to transfer what we were doing in the Hilton onto the screen. They needed to see how much we were leaping about, where we were standing, who was doing what in the background, and work out the best angles and whether it fitted in with the space restrictions and the sets that had been built. After a full run-through of Episodes 1 and 2 we were all packed off to the canteen while Barry, Terry Dicks the script editor and co. had a pow-wow with Bromly. Everyone else was completely at ease but I couldn’t bear the suspense – it felt like waiting for a jury to return its verdict.

In a sense that’s exactly what was going on. By the time we trotted back downstairs decisions would have been made on which scenes worked, which ones didn’t, which lines needed to go and, worst of all, who had new dialogue to learn. As we filed back in, everyone was handed notes. ‘Emphasise this’, ‘hold back here’, ‘scream louder’ – all pointers that the consensus felt would improve the show.

Generally I enjoy getting notes on my performances. Producers and directors are the ones you have to please, after all. Unfortunately I was also getting pointers from another quarter.

‘Lissie, how about saying that line like this?’