Doctor Who - Documentary s02e12 Episode Script

NARRATOR: In 1963, enormous political and social changes were sweeping through Great Britain.
Automatic respect for the British establishment was gone after the John Profumo spy scandal.
A new generation were finding their voice through politics, fashion and music.
And mankind was reaching for the stars in the space race.
The Tardis' magical mystery tour of the 1960s with William Hartnell's Doctor, and his successor Patrick Troughton, saw many of the seismic changes affecting British society reflected in the time traveller's many varied, and often groovy, female companions.
It's no coincidence that the Doctor's granddaughter Susan is seen listening to pop music in her first appearance.
A mystery to her teachers, Ian and Barbara, she was a mixture of the ordinary and the exotic.
At the time I was doing Doctor Who, there was a great revolution in show business generally.
Getting away from the more conventional stuff into kitchen-sink dramas and, you know, real-life, gritty stuff.
The very nature of Doctor Who meant that it was just not going to be like that.
So, therefore, I shouldn't have felt, "Oh, I want some of this to just rub off "on the character I'm playing," but I did want Susan to be more realistic in her attitude towards the things about her.
Especially the strange alien creatures that she was meeting.
And this was the trouble with my role, is that they wanted Susan to be the conduit to the kids watching.
And so, therefore, they didn't want her to be so different from them that they couldn't identify with her.
Well, I thought Carole Ann was so wonderful, because she looked so amazing.
She really was an extraordinary-looking little girl.
And there was something sort of otherworldly about her.
She brought Doctor Who's granddaughter's qualities on to the film.
And brilliantly chosen, I think, by Verity.
So this is your friendship.
NARRATOR: With Doctor Who's cast originally devised as a surrogate family, history teacher Barbara Wright was a sensible and strong matriarch, a figure common to '60s dramas like Coronation Street.
But I think Barbara was a very underrated actress.
She had such dignity as an actress.
Exquisite, I thought.
Jackie Hill was a delight.
She was a really lovely lady.
She was great to work with, very encouraging.
Very giggly.
And she had a very high-pitched giggle, too, which carried.
NARRATOR: When space orphan Vicki arrived in The Rescue in January 1965, Doctor Who really entered the swinging '60s.
She might have been shipwrecked in the future, but her startling mini-dress and cheeky attitude were definitely 1965.
Isn't it marvellous? She was sad, she was happy, she was grumpy.
She went through all the emotions in that little two-episode film, which was wonderful.
I think this was her first television, as far as I remember.
She was very much a stage actress.
She didn't try to bring a sort of otherworldliness to it at all.
She was sort of a very, very bright teenager.
And if you like adventure, my dear, I can promise you an abundance of it.
I like Maureen a lot.
We got on very well.
She is a very hard girl to get close to.
I mean, she's reserved.
But she was a really nice girl.
And she was a very good actress.
Everyone wonders why Vicki, Maureen O'Brien, was suddenly dropped.
There were all sorts of possible reasons.
She didn't get on that well with Johnny Wiles, but I don't think he terminated her contract in that way.
What happened was he didn't take up the option because we knew with the 12-part Dalek, which had been planned forever, we were going to need an older woman.
So we had, as it were, the Sara figure.
She was coming in.
We also took on board somebody to help us over the stuff that came before the 12-part Dalek.
So the Trojan handmaiden was a device.
Where are we? I can't think straight.
You must rest.
The tablets I gave you have made you better.
- But you must still rest.
- Tablets? What's going on here? NARRATOR: Katarina, a Trojan handmaiden from the distant past, was a complete contrast to Vicki.
I don't think she knew that her contract was only for the next four episodes after that.
Where she died, sucked out of an airlock.
So she went.
I don't think she was expecting to go then.
It was very sad.
She was a lovely girl.
A really nice girl.
Without me, I doubt if you'd have got this far either.
All right, but I won't let you hurt Katarina.
NARRATOR: As the nation's children reeled from the first ever death of one of the Tardis' crew, waiting in the wings was a replacement, who was modelled on the series that Doctor Who's godfather, Sydney Newman, had commissioned five years earlier.
Honor Blackman's Cathy Gale, partnered with suave gentleman spy John Steed in The Avengers, completely revolutionised female characters on television.
I think that Cathy Gale was very much a one-off thing, because up till then really, we'd had the little woman who waited by the kitchen sink for the man to come home.
It empowered women to think that you might, with a little effort, jump the last hurdle yourself, you know.
And it was lovely for them to see that a woman was finally being allowed to be the intellectual equal of a man and the physical equal of a man.
NARRATOR: At home in the company ofThe Avengers and 007, Sara Kingdom was as 1965 as Biba and The Beatles.
Sara started as quite an evil person, if my memory serves me correctly, and then gradually she evolved.
And I became quite a good woman to the point that today people think I was a real companion, a Doctor Who companion.
But I wasn't.
I was Sara Kingdom nasty and then Sara Kingdom nice.
Sadly, the most memorable thing about my performance was the way she died.
I was attacked by a sort of time machine, which made me age very fast.
So we had to keep cutting, of course.
And I would age more and more and more.
Very depressing it was, too.
Horrid little wrinkles and all that.
And then finally I died.
And at my death there was a close-up of me looking very old, but I'm pleased to say, it wasn't me, it was a double.
Now it's my turn.
I think I'm going to enjoy this game.
NARRATOR: Dorothea "Dodo" Chaplet was a new spin on the substitute granddaughters the Doctor kept acquiring.
With her fashionable, sometime-Northern accent, unisex haircut and Bob Dylan cap, she looked like she'd wandered into the Tardis from the front row of a Rolling Stones or Small Faces gig.
Jackie Lane joined playing Dodo.
And, I mean, Jackie was great, totally different from all the others.
This really bubbly little girl.
There was a childlike element about Jackie and I liked her a lot.
Hello, we met the other night, remember? - Oh, yeah, I think I do.
- You think you do? I must have made a big impression on him.
NARRATOR: 1960s It girl Polly changed forever the perception of the Doctor Who girl.
Previously portrayed as either teenage girls or mature women, Polly was in her early 20s.
Stylish, sexy and the authentic face of swinging London.
I'd started working when I was 11.
So, and I had worked solidly on sort of building the career slowly up and up so I was doing a lot of television.
I'd already made The Pleasure Girls with Clive Donner and Some People with Clive Donner.
And just before Doctor Who, I went up for a part in Blowup, which was that big Antonioni film.
I didn't get it.
Vanessa Redgrave did, but that's another story.
She was so different from the others somehow, she was a sort of liberated young lady.
It's very nice for me at this moment to be given the opportunity to redress my mistaken remark when I said that Polly was a frightened, weedy lady.
This was me only remembering that in my mind when I was thinking of the character, how to portray the character, that we had Honor Blackman, who was dressed in black leather and chucking people over her shoulder, in The Avengers, and I thought that I would play it for real.
So that when Polly and Ben met, you know, the monster crabs or we met the Cybermen for the first time, we would be frightened.
We wouldn't be clever and cool.
We would just be totally scared.
But at the same time, although we felt the fear, we did it anyway.
I mean, at one point she goes up to the Cybermen and she's saying, "Oi, you can't do this, this is not fair.
" She also had a lot of grit.
I was looking forward to working with Anneke, because she was like the epitome of the swinging '60s.
The Mary Quant short skirt, the Courreges boots and the blonde, swinging London.
And I'd seen her in a couple of movies before.
But I always got that feeling that, "Who are you? We're quite happy, just the three of us.
"We don't need four in the Tardis now.
" Anneke would come in the morning, give Patrick a big hug, Michael Craze a big hug and go, "Hi, Frazer.
" I must say, she's given me lots of hugs since.
Every time we meet at a convention, she's made it up to me a thousand fold.
NARRATOR: In 1967, BBC Television was showing two Victorian-inspired TVshows.
The classic series The Forsyte Saga was being shown to critical acclaim and huge audiences.
Elsewhere, Victorian adventurer Adam De Vere Adamant, who'd been thawed out in swinging London, was partnered with a trendy blonde who clearly shopped in the same boutiques as Polly.
As Polly's replacement, producer Innes Lloyd reversed the Adam Adamant Lives! Format so that the Doctor was accompanied by a young Victorian lady.
DALEK: You have not eaten.
You will eat.
That is an order.
- Answer.
- Yes.
I got the part, and I thought, "Terrific" It was a children's show at that time.
And I thought, "Oh, good, a job for a year.
"That will be nice.
" And they made me very welcome, Pat and Frazer.
They took me under their wing.
I watched some episodes and they were always so protective of me.
I'd forgotten how protective they were, especially Frazer.
Debbie had been in for about four, five months.
We had a Yeti story and, of course, Professor Travers was Jack Watling, her father.
In fact, him and I ganged up on Debbie.
She was supposed to be in a trance, you know, like that.
And we had to go up behind her and go clap, clap, clap.
"Oh, no, Victoria is still in a trance.
" And in the rehearsal, which was a church hall, big, echoey church hall, we found this tin trunk full of props and we went, looked at each other, and we tipped up and we just dropped this trunk.
She leapt.
"My God!" She leapt, and she turned and said, "Daddy, Daddy, you're ganging up on me.
" People said to me that we were like a three-person double act.
I think it was because we gelled so much.
We got on so much off-screen as is on, but the most important was Pat.
I still miss him to this day.
I always will do.
NARRATOR: With the first moon landing only a year away, space travel was very much in vogue in 1968.
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey featured elegant sequences of spacecraft in flight.
Roger Vadim's Barbarella featured an astronaut dressed in a bizarre array of exotic outfits.
Doctor Who's last female companion of the 1960s would owe something to both these zeitgeist-defining space epics.
Well, the rocket couldn't have drifted 87 million miles off course.
So what's your theory? NARRATOR: With a career as an astrophysicist, kinky boots and cat suits, Zoe Heriot was a cute space oddity.
Although actress Wendy Padbury would later complain that she was soon screaming like all the rest, her stories show her to be resourceful, prone to teasing the intellectually-challenged Jamie and competitive with the Doctor.
It's amazing.
Even the best of our students have registered less than half that score.
Yes, well, Zoe is something of a genius.
Of course, it can be very irritating at times.
When she joined us, we were known as the smallest show on earth.
'Cause Patrick was 5'8", I'm 5'8" and Padders was about that tall.
There must be something we can do.
No, Zoe, not this time.
NARRATOR: As Jamie and Zoe were sent home by the Time lords and the Doctor was exiled to Earth in the last episode of the 1960s, the end of Doctor Who coincided with the close of the most memorable decade in the 20th century.
For the people who were there, their association with Doctor Who and the 1960s is something they'll always cherish.
I loved doing Doctor Who.
I loved every minute of it.
I loved working with the cast, I loved working with Verity and I loved everybody on it.
It was a swinging time, it really was.
Everything was fun.
There seemed to be One didn't have to be totally responsible, you know, one could enjoy oneself without fear of retribution or anything else.
It was a great time.
It was great fun.
It was elating and, of course, the mini-skirts, the Quant and all that.
There was a sense of liberation and freedom.
And I enjoyed every minute of it.
And, in fact, I think I can fairly safely say I was a rock chick.
I can remember very well, sitting on Dennis Wilson's knee.
And I think that's as good as it can get.