Jon loved whizzing around in the Whomobile. Afterwards he took it on Blue Peter to show off all the gadgetry. When you think of it, the BBC really wrung every opportunity out of that car – and yet they wouldn’t give him a penny for it.
Jon wasn’t the most technically minded person but he was a magpie with anything modern and shiny. And if he couldn’t use it, he knew someone at home who could. After every show he would go up to the props guy and say, ‘You don’t need that any more, do you?’ Before you knew it, some new toy was in his pocket ready to give to his young son, Sean. I remember one occasion we had to do a reshoot and Jon had already snaffled the prop. Barry said, ‘We really need it back, Jon.’
‘Leave it to me.’
He was as good as his word.
‘Sean gave it back, then?’ Barry asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Jon sighed sheeplishly, ‘but I had to bloody pay him for it!’
I enjoyed filming out and about in London, although as well as Westminster and Trafalgar Square there were the less glamorous locations of Southall and Wimbledon Common. Apparently when the TARDIS put down for the first time the ‘Police Call Box’ sign was missing but I didn’t notice – and neither did anyone else at the time. That gives you some idea of the time pressures we worked under. We had enough to do just keeping track of where we were in the script – always a problem when you’re shooting out of sequence. I remember waiting with Jon for our first take at a new location.
‘Remind me, Lissie,’ he said. ‘Have we been running?’
I nodded.
‘Out of breath, then?’
‘Out of breath.’
Those three words became our shorthand before every new scene. Later, Ian Marter abbreviated it further.
‘O.O.B., Sladen?’
‘O.O.B., Ian.’
I got to know script editor Terry Dicks a bit during this shoot, which was a treat. He’s a very approachable man and will still happily talk about Who for hours with anyone. He cared, and still does care, so passionately about everything on the show but he could have a laugh all the same. Jon wasn’t renowned for having the best memory – it wasn’t completely unknown for him to write some of the more complicated lines on the frilly cuffs of some of his shirts. You’d see him just before a take flipping his sleeve up and down, trying to sneak a peep. Terry, of course, just loved trying to get Jon to say more and more complex phrases – and when you’re talking about time and space and all manner of far-out technology, that can be exceedingly complex. So it was Terry who came up with the classic ‘reverse the polarity of the neutron flow’ – as much to vex Jon as anything else. He put it in The Sea Devils and thought, Jon will never go for that.
‘But he loved it!’ Terry laughed. ‘He kept wanting to say it in every programme.’
And sure enough, there it was in Dinosaurs when the Doctor decides to ‘reverse the polarity’ of the Timescoop. (Fans will be able to recite all the other references over the years, but I do recall David Tennant saying in The Lazarus Experiment, ‘It really shouldn’t take that long to reverse the polarity. I must be getting out of practice.’ It’s incredible how a little piece of jargon can take on a life of its own.)
* * *
Picking up the character of Sarah Jane after so many months off was almost like starting again. The Time Warrior had yet to be broadcast so I was still in the dark as to how I’d come across. Still, I was anxious to capture the same characteristics as far as possible. I tore off a piece of my script, found a quiet corner in the Acton Hilton and jotted down a few things that I decided I must never forget about her. After that, whenever I felt lost in a scene I’d pull that scrap of paper out and remind myself how Sarah Jane should be. I used it for ages. In fact, I’ve still got it.
One of the things I wrote on it was Sarah’s purpose. Sometimes you’d be handed a script and have to really dig for the character’s story. Her role in the show – like any companion – is to ask the questions the audience wants to ask. She’s the foil for the Doctor, so he can prove how clever he is. There’s no shame in being less intelligent than a Time Lord but one or two of the writers tried to get me to say all sorts of rubbish. I’d then have to pull them up. Sarah had to be an intelligent audience, that was very important to me. I remember Tom pulling one director up, saying, ‘Lis can’t say that because that would make her stupid and I don’t take stupid people around with me.’
As far as Sarah Jane’s actual character went, though, I had two very different people in mind. The first was a cousin. She was eight when I was in my teens and my overriding memory of her is her sheer indomitable attitude. She was young and naïve enough to really rail against any perceived injustices with the words ‘It’s not fair!’ She said it all the time, with the absolute certainty you have before you realise that life just isn’t fair. Taking her attitude on board, Sarah Jane became a fighter: she wouldn’t give up, whatever the odds, just because she felt slighted. She could fall down a quarry every week and still come out, fists clenched and ready for revenge.
There was another influence on Sarah Jane and it’s one that I didn’t even realise myself until years later. I was doing a magazine interview and I said, ‘I think I may have based Sarah a little bit on Barry Letts.’ And once I’d said it, the more obvious it was that it was true. Interviews can be very therapeutic like that – they force you to think about things in different ways. Imagine how much writing this book has taught me about myself!
Barry had great strength of character. He would never say yes if he meant no and he would never be devious; he wasn’t interested in playing games. I don’t know anyone who would say a bad word about him. And yet he was very strong-minded. I’ve seen him really lose his rag big time – really big time – because he’s so committed. So that was something I wanted to incorporate: Barry’s honesty and his straightforwardness.
After that little epiphany, which happened during the press for the third series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, so quite a long while after I’d been playing her, I got a text from Russell T Davies. ‘I’ve never heard you say that before,’ he said.
Honestly, that man must read everything!
* * *
Filming for Dinosaurs ran as before, with three lots of eight days at Acton culminating in two filming days at Television Centre. Rehearsals were fun, actually. One or two of us struggled not to smile at a couple of the lines, and there’s always a bit of a laugh when a bunch of you are acting to a chair and being told to pretend it’s a Stegosaurus. But we all took it very seriously – with Paddy around, there was little choice. No one was dismissive; you can’t be an actor if you’re going to be condescending about your material. Once you stop believing, you’re lost. I don’t care if I’m doing Play for Today or Jackanory, acting against an imaginary dinosaur or Banquo’s ghost – it makes no odds.
Beginning on 15–16 October, we concentrated on the first two episodes as usual, plus some of the underground stuff from Episode 4. As usual it was all against the clock. Ten p.m. was the cut-off point. A second after that and the plug would be pulled. As I said, the unions were so strong in the Seventies, there was nothing we could do, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary to butcher the odd scene just to get something in the can. You’d get to half past nine, see how much was still left to do and know you were going to have to fly through it. Anything, just to get it done – all that hard work, all that rehearsal, being pushed and pushed by Paddy Russell, just to see a terrible last-minute hatchet job of a rewrite rushed through.