Committing two separate speeches to memory is far easier than learning two versions of the same one – you get so confused, your tongue’s saying one version while your brain is remembering the other. I was still poring over it in makeup with a couple of the other actors when I heard one of them say, ‘It’s no good – I can’t learn this.’
‘Thank God for that!’ I said. ‘I can’t make it stick either.’
Not surprisingly we had a lot of trouble that day. It didn’t help that the cameramen wouldn’t stop talking to me about Doctor Who! I was shoving rescue remedy down my throat and grabbing my script in between takes. During one seated scene all three of us had our scripts out of shot on our laps so we could snatch an emergency peek!
I had fun but it wasn’t the big comeback I perhaps needed to boot me up the backside and get me back out there. In fact after that, I only took one more stab at acting, in a series called Faith in the Future with Lynda Bellingham – then I just thought, Do you know what? I’ve had a go, I’ve been busy, but I haven’t really enjoyed it.
And so I retired.
Goodbye work. Goodbye acting. And goodbye Doctor Who.
* * *
Knowing I wouldn’t be working again made it more fun to spend time with my old Who cohorts. In 1996 I bumped into Jon at an event organised by Nathan-Turner. Jon was in his mid-70s by then, but he looked well. He was on good form, too – cheeky, chatty and brimming with gossip as usual. We had a marvellous time reminiscing about this and that, at ease without any work pressures hanging over us. Among other things I remember he was very excited about going to stay with friends over in New England. Then at one point he leaned in and I thought, This must be good if he’s lowering his voice! Jon was hardly discreet.
But this time the gossip was about him: ‘By the way, I had a little crie de coeur recently.’
That floored me.
‘Oh, Jon, I didn’t know you had heart trouble!’
‘It’s nothing, darling,’ he said, dismissing my concern with a wave of his hand. ‘Just a little warning.’
That was the last time I saw him.
A few weeks later I got home and saw my answerphone flashing. I was still taking off my coat and unpacking my bags when I flicked ‘play’, but the message soon had my full attention.
I recognised the voice instantly as Stuart Money, a close friend of Jon’s.
‘Hello, Lissie, it’s Stuey,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way to the airport. It’s about Jon. I will talk to you later but I think you’re going to get quite a shock.’
I sat by that phone for the rest of the day – if anyone else called I just told them to get off the line. And then my worst fears were confirmed: Jon had suffered a heart attack in America.
My Doctor was dead.
I went to the funeral. Sadie sent a little something, too. But do you know who wasn’t there? Barry! No one had told him. Incredible. He was devastated, of course.
The problem with being in the public eye is you’re not given a chance to grieve. Every time I thought that I was over the shock another journalist would pop up asking for a comment. I don’t normally mind, but I wanted to do the best by Jon and I also wanted to be alone and cry.
It wasn’t until I did manage a few minutes alone with my thoughts that I appreciated just how much we’d experienced together. All the shows, obviously, but there were so many private moments, too. Even our big US trip – yes, Brian and Ingeborg were there and we all had a blast – but there were only two people up on those stages. Jon was the only one who knew what I’d gone through first hand. And now he was gone.
Jon’s legacy speaks for itself, but all these years later I do get annoyed at the number of people popping out of the woodwork to tell you how Jon was, what he thought, and what he apparently said to them. There are certain DVD commentaries where the world and his wife seem to have an opinion and I find myself shouting at the screen, ‘How do you know? You weren’t there!’ Some of them weren’t even born at the time, for goodness’ sake.
* * *
The older you get, the more often you have to deal with loss. When my father died, on Boxing Day 1994 – aged 94 – I thought my world had collapsed. We’ve always been alone down here in London but at that moment I suddenly realised it was Brian, Sadie and me against the world.
The tragedy of being associated with such a long-running show is that, inevitably, people you worked with, people you loved, will die. Some, like Jon, will be quite old. Others, like John Nathan-Turner (who died in May 2002, aged 55) are taken much too soon. Tom Baker was hilarious at JNT’s memorial. It feels so unnatural attending the ceremony of a man as young as Nathan, but Gary, his partner, insisted his life should be celebrated. We were at St Paul’s, the actors’ church in Covent Garden. Tom gazed up at the heavens and said, ‘Sorry, John – it’s this St Paul’s’, which broke the ice. Then he brought the house down when he said: ‘What would John, looking down, be thinking now? Well, I can tell you …
‘He would be thinking, I would rather it were Tom up here than me!’
Chapter Sixteen
That’s The Last I’ll Be Hearing From Them
I ENTERED THE restaurant thinking, I’m going to lose my agent over this!
I was in central London, at a very swish venue, and about to meet Russell T Davies and Phil Collinson. Russell, of course, was the creative head of the newly regenerated Doctor Who and Phil was the show’s producer. They’d asked my new agent, Roger Carey, if we could meet and I’d duly gone along with it. I wasn’t hopeful. Approaching my sixtieth birthday and thoroughly enjoying my retirement, my thoughts were so far away from Who you’d need a telescope to spot them.
Still, it’s always polite to attend these meetings and hear what people have to say. And a meal at an expensive restaurant with wonderful company is never to be sniffed at. The trick is not being afraid to turn offers down – which we, as actors, find notoriously hard to do. There’s always this fear: ‘What if nothing else comes along?’ I’d lived with the spectre of ‘what if’ most my life but that was all behind me now – being a full-time wife and mother was quite enough, thank you very much.
But I wasn’t daft. I knew Russell and Phil wouldn’t have called just for the sake of it. They were obviously planning to propose something – just as I was planning to turn it down. It wasn’t that I thought their new series with Chris Eccleston and Billie Piper didn’t look amazing – because it did; it was marvellous – but my time on Who was so precious to me that I wasn’t prepared to spoil it again for a cheap ratings-boosting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-me cameo. If Russell wanted someone from the ‘classic series’ to fill a few screen seconds then there would be no shortage of others who I was sure would leap at the chance.
And so, a little guilty that I was wasting my hosts’ time, I decided to just relax and enjoy my afternoon.
From the moment I sat down I knew I was in the company of two men who cared more about their programme than anything else in the world. They weren’t in it for the money or the ratings – although of course these would come – they truly, deeply sweated and bled Doctor Who. And not just Who. Towards me they were so warm and welcoming, and charming and funny, and … I could go on all day. It was a really unforgettable dinner. Russell will have anyone hooting with laughter in seconds, but he’s so sharp and serious as well.
Out of the blue he placed a script on the table and said, ‘We’d like you to do this story.’