Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography

that’s the direction I took. I don’t think I’d do it that way again. That whole performance is far from one of my favourites. It’s just so slow, especially those lines, ‘Eldrad must live! Eldrad must live!’ There were a dozen ways to take it and unfortunately I opted for the wrong one.

Despite my personal reservations, it seems to be a very popular serial. Believe it or not, the single most requested line I’m asked to quote for fans is ‘Eldrad must live!’. Bizarre, isn’t it? Of all the thousands of words Sarah must have said. I remember being at a convention in LA, in the lift on the way up to my room, and this guy got in. He must have been from the convention because it was clear he was nearly fainting with excitement behind me. I couldn’t ignore it, so I turned round and gave him a smile.

‘Please,’ he begged me, ‘please just say “Eldrad must live!” I won’t get out until you say it.’

Absolutely true!

So I said it – in that ridiculous slow-mo delivery – and he got out at the next floor, the happiest man in California.

Apart from the exposure to radioactivity, the power station proved a challenging location in other ways. There were so many platforms and ladders running all over the place that it would have been remiss not to incorporate them, but during the final chase scene I thought my legs were going to drop off. I was going up and down, up and down this bloody metal ladder, literally quivering with exhaustion by the end of it. There was a rail all the way up but I wasn’t allowed to fall on it for help and it was really steep. The next day I could barely walk, my quads were screaming in agony. You’d just make it to the top then you’d hear bloody Lennie, ‘Lis, could you do it again but this time …’ It was really horrendous.

At least they could see me coming. I still get letters today about my outfit for The Hand of Fear – my ‘Andy Pandy’ costume as I call Sarah’s red top, striped dungarees and little cap.

I remember saying to our costume girl, Barbie Lane, ‘Do you know what? It’s the end of the road, she could wear anything. Let’s just go to town on it.’

There was a shop in Kensington High Street called Bus Stop, quite small but very trendy at the time. Barbie bought these red-and-white pantaloons and I said, ‘Brilliant, but how can we make them our own?’ So we sewed stars onto the front, just to make them different from the rest on the hangers.

And we didn’t stop there. We got this coat and tied a bandana around me. Then we found a top and socks plus a hat to match. It was pretty extraordinary but I thought, Why not? It’s Sarah’s last stand. I’m going to go for gold in this episode. Rationally, she’s been with the Doctor for so long, seen so many unimaginable sights, that she’s totally lost it as far as Earth clothes are concerned; that’s what the Doctor’s done to her. After all, space travel has very many strange effects on the human brain and form.

I wanted to underline the transformation of a Doctor’s companion. By then I was no longer the Sarah Jane with the suit and the shoulder bag who had gone in – I wasn’t even the Sarah Jane who’d worn that body-warmer in Morbius! I had experienced so much, I’d evolved, and that was reflected in my clothes.

After a busy few days we headed for our third outdoor location, a park in Thornbury. This was to be a tricky one, probably the trickiest of them all. There weren’t any stunts or vast cast ensembles to rehearse with; nobody had to wear an alien costume or act against a blue screen. All of those things would have been preferable to this. Because this was the day I filmed my goodbye.

I was content that Sarah wasn’t being married or killed off – the same thing, some might think. Either of those would have seemed too neat. Sarah was never neat – she was a maverick, I always thought. As close to the Doctor in her unpredictability as any human could be. So she wasn’t about to go out in a blaze of laser fire or an exploding castle: she would simply open the TARDIS door and walk away.

But how to make that believable?

When I received the script, I was appalled. It was as if the writers had never watched Sarah and the Doctor before.

She can’t bow out like this, it’s not right, I thought.

In their defence, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, the writers, had decided the moment was too big for them so they’d simply sketched an outline and Robert had fleshed it out. But I didn’t realise this at first – I just saw a clunky, monosyllabic exchange that made me see red. I was so upset that I scrawled rude words all over it. Childish, I know, but when I picked up that pen the emotion just gushed out. Maybe I was more discombobulated about my imminent departure than I was ready to admit.

Fortunately, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes agreed.

‘There are only two people who know how the Doctor and Sarah would handle this,’ they said to me and Tom, ‘and it’s you.’

I didn’t see that coming, but what an honour. And they were absolutely right: Tom and I were the keepers of these precious characters. We lived them every day, every week for nine months or more each year.

As I recall, the plot get-out Robert had come up with was that the Doctor had been summoned back to Gallifrey – home planet of the Time Lords, where no humans were allowed – so he would be forced to drop Sarah off in Croydon. That was fine. Even at the end of The Seeds of Doom, after all, Sarah had been angling to get home. She was after a breather from the action as well – but how to make it real?

Tom and I put a lot of thought into this. It was terribly liberating. ‘What about …?’

‘No, he wouldn’t do that. But what about …?’

‘No, she’d run a mile!’

It went on like that all afternoon. And then we realised what was missing …

The cameras rolled and we delivered the most heartfelt lines of our careers. It was two whole pages – a lot bearing in mind we filmed about eight or nine a day normally.

So what did we come up with in the end? It was quite straight-forward, actually.

Sarah said, ‘Don’t forget me.’

‘Oh, Sarah, don’t you forget me,’ the Doctor replied.