The Doctor may have changed but another co-star proved as temperamental as ever. You can imagine how thrilled I was when I saw in the script that I’d be reunited with K-9! As usual, I was in the minority, though. It was one thing MPs being smitten but this time when the dog appeared, all those hardened professionals suddenly melted, reverting to children, oohing and ahing over K-9 like it was a new baby. Once it started moving people couldn’t get enough of it. I remember Billie saying she wanted to buy one. Well, that was before it banged into her for the tenth time in rehearsal! It can actually give you quite a nasty whack. Funnily enough, Billie never mentioned it again after that.
All these years later and it was still just an inanimate box on wheels. I foresaw plenty of uncomfortable scenes delivering dialogue crouched by its side, or take after take waiting for it to surmount a particularly tricky bump in the studio floor. Actually, full marks to Russell, he’d already thought of this. As well as Mat’s K-9 they found another one that a local guy had made. This model couldn’t move like the original – which isn’t saying much – but you could remove its side panel and see the innards. So now we had the dog on a table being fixed and all the humans in shot at the same time, without being hunched over. Genius! Why hadn’t anyone thought of this on K-9 and Company?
Ironically, it turned out that K-9’s mobility was the least of our problems.
At the end of the first day we had to film a scene where David and I run out of the school gym. Some things never change, I thought. Doctor Who has – and always had – more haring around than Challenge Anneka. Anyway, we just had to bolt straight forward and turn really quickly out of the door. Pretty simple stuff, really.
Unless you’re on a polished parquet floor, wearing heeled boots.
We shot off on cue. In his trademark pumps, David stuck to the floor like glue. But I didn’t! As I went for the turn, I felt my standing leg slip away followed by the sound of something going ‘snap’.
‘Christ!’ I said, clutching my thigh. It felt as if I’d been shot.
‘Lis, are you all right?’ David asked, instinctively reverting to his natural Scottish accent.
‘I’m fine, it’s OK.’
But it wasn’t. I struggled on but I couldn’t put any weight on that side and I knew in my heart I needed to go to hospital. As soon as my scenes ended I fell into my car and was driven to A&E. When the doctors said I had destabilised my pelvis and torn my quad I just wanted to cry. Back in my hotel that night my thoughts turned as black as my leg. They’re going to hate me if I ruin this. What choice was I leaving them? They’d written a whole show for me, gone to the trouble of making a very specific link between modern Who and the classic series. And now, like a silly old woman, I was about to wreck everything. You don’t let people do all this for you then bleed on them!
I admit, I’ve had better nights.
Eventually I decided the only thing to do was to play it down – I owed it to the team. As soon as people started worrying about me, they wouldn’t be focused on their own jobs (it’s human nature) and then the show would suffer. David already had enough on his plate without me adding to it and the last thing anyone needed was headlines saying ‘geriatric assistant ruins comeback’. So, if anyone asked I’d be just ‘sore’.
Phil was great – ‘if there’s anything you need’ – and the director, James Hawes, shuffled things as much as possible, although I’m sure he was secretly cursing me under his breath. If you look at the programme again, you can see Rose’s boyfriend, Mickey, occasionally helping me around. And if you look really closely, you can see one of my thighs is twice the size of the other! I don’t know how I got those jeans on and off.
So much of my performance has always been about body language but when it takes all your strength just to keep upright, you’re bound to skimp on the details. I know I could have done an awful lot more in that episode. As it was, I struggled to do the basics. Worst of all was the shame of knowing I was less mobile than K-9!
During the final goodbye scene with David, walking up those park steps to the TARDIS, I was dying with every step. But I made it and I got my lines out. Job done!
Then I got the call from James, ‘Can you go up a bit more quickly?’
The tears were seconds away. I’ll be lucky to get up them at all.
In hindsight, if I’d been honest, maybe we could have done it differently but the script was written and I didn’t want to be the one to change it. This was the team’s third episode together. Billie and David were just getting established – they needed to be thinking about each other, not me.
As a result, I must have come across as a mad woman – I couldn’t focus on anything apart from my leg. I remember sitting next to David between takes. He was so charming, just nattering about this and that before going on to ask about how it felt for me being there. He said, ‘It must be really strange for you coming back after all the other Doctors?’ And all the while I was screaming inside at the pain. Everything he threw at me I answered with a strained ‘Hmm’, ‘Yes’ or just a bit of nodding. He said he’d been a fan since he was a kid – I bet he wasn’t by the end of that!
It was the same with Billie. On her first day on set we were gearing up to do some more running, or limping in my case, and she said, ‘Oh, what did your character used to wear?’ My head was all over the place so I managed to spit out something like, ‘Oh yes, a funny skirt’, but it came out a bit off, really. I’m sure Billie must have thought I was a little dim.
The leg really alienated me, I’m afraid. When I wasn’t on call, I was on my own packing it with ice or resting. As a result I never really felt part of the team. Even when I was free, events conspired against me. David had a roof terrace on the top of his trailer and I remember enviously listening to him and Anthony Head enjoying themselves up there – while I was stuck downstairs, doing interview after interview. Apparently the outside world was quite excited about the return of Sarah Jane.
It was such an honour to have been chosen to return and despite everything I really did have an amazing time but the leg colours everything, even today. I know we produced a fantastic episode but it’s ingrained in my head that the whole thing was a disaster. In fact, I still can’t see David or anyone else from that shoot without fighting embarrassment.
At least my last day was memorable for more pleasant reasons. As we began, the First announced, ‘Lis’s last day’, and then at the end there was a round of applause. Honestly, they couldn’t have done any more to make me feel important. Even so, as I boarded the train back to London, I thought, That’s the last I’ll be hearing from them.
Chapter Seventeen
In Case The Buggers Change The Locks
THE THING about Russell T Davies is he never stops planning. My farewell in School Reunion was originally written as being quite a tear-jerker. Then Russell said, ‘You know what, sad endings are too easy to do. Let’s have her walking away into the sunset with the dog, a spring in her step and the future at her feet.’ So that’s what we did. (If I’d whistled ‘Bow Wow’ it would have been The Hand of Fear all over again.) Even as we filmed it you got a sense that Sarah was going on to bigger and better things. It never occurred to me that we would ever discover what.