Doctor Who - Documentary s02e03 Episode Script

Well, Susan was supposed to be Well, she was presented as being 15, but of course, who knows what she was? I mean, she could have been hundreds of years old.
An extraordinary, unusual, strange person.
And I would have loved to have played her like that but it just didn't happen.
Unfortunately, my part was toned down a hell of a lot because originally, she was going to be tremendously athletic.
You know, sort of à la Avengers.
And at the time I was a dancer and acrobat and I could have done all these things really very well indeed.
That didn't happen.
And she was going to be very stylistic.
She was going to have an amazing wardrobe, and that didn't happen.
She was going to be extraordinarily intelligent and have telepathic communication, at least with her grandfather and possibly with some of the aliens.
Well, that only happened in one story, the Sensorite story.
And I can understand where they were coming from, because they actually wanted her to be more like normal teenagers, so normal teenagers could identify with her.
Susan lost out on the nice costumes.
I mean, that was another thing that I was really mad about.
These boring little shoes and these boring little trousers and these boring little tops that she had to wear.
Except, of course, in the lovely, lovely period things, you know, the historical parts.
No wonder I like those the best.
The one thing that I did have, which was quite exciting, was my own very special haircut, invented for me by Vidal Sassoon.
This haircut was copied all over the world.
(FEMALE INTERVIEWER SPEAKING) -That was my most adventurous costume! -Was it? I'd fought for that.
It was a Mary Quant top, that was.
And I had the whole thing.
I had stripy leggings as well, but I wasn't allowed to wear those as well.
I mean (DISMISSIVE GROAN) I was supposed to disappear into the background, I think.
Bill, William Hartnell and I, luckily developed a really good, strong relationship.
And it was supposed to be that he was my grandfather, I was his granddaughter.
And we did have this grandfatherly, grand-paternalistic sort of attitude from him.
It was funny, it sort of spread into rehearsals.
And spread into Bill's attitude towards me.
And quite often I would have to say, "Look, you know, Bill, "I'm not actually 15, "and you're not actually my grandfather, so don't talk to me as though you are.
" He'd boss me around a bit and tell me off for spending all my money on frivolous things.
I mean, I adored clothing.
It was the '60s, for goodness sake.
And Bill used to say, "You're frittering away your money.
"You're in a regular job now, "but you won't be in a regular job for long.
"And really, you should hang onto it a bit and save up.
" And I used to say, "Bill, let me spend my money in my own way.
" And we had little spats like that.
Only little ones, little ones.
He was adorable.
I liked him very much.
-Oh, Grandfather! -Susan! If you watch any of the scenes we have together, he's constantly got his arms around me, squeezing my shoulder and mussing my hair.
And it's just hands-on all the time.
Yes, you need taking in hand.
Luckily, I'm the same sort of actor.
So if there's a scene where, you know, I've been in a situation where I'm frightened and I'm back with my grandfather, immediately, up to him, arms around him, hugging him, squeezing him, you know, and it helped that we were genuinely fond of each other.
You didn't touch the controls, did you? No.
Or you? I know Susan wouldn't.
I'm worried about that child.
There was always an edge to Bill's performance.
You never really knew how he would react.
And he was just, um, a sort of element of unexploded bomb to him.
Bill was absolutely marvellous in the role.
And I think he'd love to have played it forever and ever and ever.
But unfortunately, he only managed to do it for three years.
He was not in the best of health.
And I think this became increasingly obvious as he got into the part more.
And I think it just wasn't possible for him to continue.
We would go in on the Monday, and if we were lucky we had the scripts for the Monday.
Sometimes, we'd be given lines to say which were totally out of character.
And we would have to say things like, "Well, I'm sorry my character wouldn't say this "or wouldn't do this.
" And we might start marking it, you know, putting the tapes on the floors and deciding where we were going to move and where we going to be still and whatever.
And the next day, we would hopefully have scripts out of the way so we could work it without the books.
Notice I don't talk about character development at this stage.
That hardly ever came into it.
It was constantly change, change, change.
It wasn't a question of just learning a script, go in and do it.
It was developing the whole week.
And then on the Thursday you'd have the suits in.
And they might decide, "Oh, no, that's a bit too rough.
"That's a bit too frightening.
We can't do that.
" So again, another change.
Or, "Hmm, no, that's not exciting enough.
" So another change.
Um So then on Friday we were in the studio.
And there might then be even more changes because what we thought was going to work didn't work or something to do with the lighting or whatever.
So it was virtually a live performance.
We were only allowed, I think, about three cuts.
Three breaks.
So if there were fluffs, you know, if we said our lines incorrectly or did something else that was wrong, tough.
Verity, of course, Verity Lambert was absolutely amazing.
Not least for the fact that she was a most wonderfully talented person, but she was a most wonderfully talented young female person.
And this was just unheard of at the time.
I mean, to be given such a big, important project.
I think there must have been quite a few male producers who were very miffed at this.
And obviously she felt she had to prove herself.
But I don't think she had to worry about that.
She was very, very strong and very, very clear.
I remember her as being quite frightening, actually.
I think she'd laugh now if she heard me say that.
When she first began on the job, a number of directors came up to her and said, patted her on the hand and said, "Don't worry, darling, I'll look after you.
"I'll show you the ropes.
" And I think she soon put them in their place.
I know she had to fight for an awful lot of things that she wanted.
And she was always fighting for something or the other, I know.
She was extraordinary.
And of course, when we first saw the Daleks we only saw half of them, because we saw them in rehearsals with small men inside (LAUGHS) paddling them along.
And we thought they were hysterically funny and couldn't understand how anybody could imagine they were ever going to be terrifying.
And, uh In fact, once they were in the studio and once that voice was attached to them, and once you were in the situation of acting with them, they were quite menacing.
They weren't actually that manoeuvrable.
So they couldn't go terribly fast and they couldn't whip round very fast.
And you never knew who was who.
So the only way to overcome that was stick numbers on them until the actual time for shooting came.
(LAUGHS) Sort of, "Come in number one, come in number two.
" But it was great fun, it was always great fun doing Doctor Who.
It was very odd, as one was in the programme, to see mini Daleks all over the place.
Children in playgrounds being Daleks.
What is it about these things? (LAUGHS) Daleks taking over the Earth.
It was amazing, I mean It got quite frantic at times.
It was like being a pop star.
Especially after the Daleks came in.
I mean, that just accelerated everything.
It's difficult to convey just how popular it was, actually.
I suppose the only terms one can think of is the Beatles, you know, pop stardom.
I was sent all sorts of requests.
You know, could I be made into a puppet? Could I be made into a little bronze figure? Could I be made into one of a chess set? Could I be made into a pinball machine game? It would have to be my favourite one lost, yes.
I loved doing "Marco Polo".
It was just so easy.
It was just so easy to act.
And of course, in that one I had somebody who was about the same size and the same sort of age as me, Zienia Merton, who played Ping-Cho.
And it was just great for me because usually I was the smallest person on the set.
And they could never get the lighting.
The lighting was never directed to me.
So half the time I didn't have the correct lighting.
And the mics didn't pick me up as well, either, because everybody was about three foot taller than me.
And I'm sort of jumping up to try and catch the mics.
No, but generally, it was wonderland.
It was just beautiful.
I didn't seem to seem to have particularly exciting monsters to have to deal with, really.
I had the Daleks, of course, and things like Voord.
But they weren't as exciting and compelling as things like the Cybermen and all sorts of other things that came later.
But the thing that did freak me out when I was doing it, and I didn't even have a scene with it, it's just that, you know, you wander round from set to set to see what's going on on the other sets.
And I was wandering around and I came across this disembodied brain in a glass case.
And I sort of looked at it and said, "That is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.
" And of course, it wasn't working at that time because we were doing something on another set.
And one of the technicians thought he'd have some fun with me.
And as I was standing in front of it, looking at it, he got it working and it sort of was pulsating and throbbing.
And there was this sort of gloopy, gloopy, glurky sound going on.
It was quite disgusting.
I had nightmares about it.
"Planet of the Giants" was great fun to do.
Well, part fun, part nightmare.
(LAUGHS) It was very, very difficult physically to do because you had things like climbing up plug chains.
Only the plug chain, each link was probably about five foot wide by about six foot high.
And if you can imagine climbing up a plug chain to get to the top of the sink and sort of haring down taps and pushing your way through a jungle of grass, 'cause each blade of grass was the equivalent of about 10 foot tall.
Very, very physical.
And, uh An awful lot of imaginative enterprise was going on there because you had to, in a lot of the monster-type things, science fiction things that we did, you did actually have a monster there to react with.
But with this, because you had things like a cat you were confronting, you couldn't actually see it, so you had to imagine what it was.
Or a giant ant.
So it was a very difficult one to do, but it was good fun.
I really hoped when I started I mean, first of all, it was just so exciting to be part of it.
And I really enjoyed working with the people I was working with.
But every time my new script came, I was hoping that Susan's character was going to be developed more along the lines that we actually discussed when I was offered the role.
And it never, never happened.
Strangely enough, I was discussing this with Verity not long ago, Verity Lambert.
And I said, "You know, "I don't know why you cut out all the weird bits.
"I really think it would have been much more interesting if we "if we could have played her much more weird, unusual, strange.
" She said, "But you were weird.
" I've lost my shoe.
Well, it's actually rather forward of them, if you think of how they got rid of Susan, because you know, she didn't go off in a rosy glow down the aisle, not in that poor old fractured Earth.
She was just sort of left with this young man! And, uh, you know, she wasn't married, she was living in sin, wasn't she? So a bit naughty for those times, really, if you come to think of it.
I never thought of it like that before, but yes.
(INTERVIEWER SPEAKING) Well, she hadn't had a birthday onscreen, had she? Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.
Bill used to think yes, this was going to be the most exciting, wonderful thing and that it would run forever.
He would have loved to have seen everything that's going on now.
He'd just be saying, "I told you so, I told you so" all over the place.
He just was full of confidence.
Ah! Dear old Tardis, what did you sound like? A sort of "zzz-zzz-zzz-zzz" Sort of humming.
And, uh, that's just the general sort of life force sound of the Tardis.
And then when the central control panel goes up, sort of (WHOOSHING)