Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography

by Sladen, Elisabeth

  A complete one-off.

  There were some nice action pieces, especially Harry’s shooting and my game of hide-and-seek with him in the countryside; plenty of comedy too. I get to poke my tongue out at one man, which I think children always like seeing adults do. Tom mimics the Duke’s accent at one point, and there’s the series of jokes about the incessant bagpipes at the start. Angus Lennie, as the hotelier Angus, had some light moments, too, especially when he’s outstaring a mounted moose.

  Sadly the fun was about to end for one of us. Early in 1975 Philip Hinchcliffe had mentioned to Bobby Holmes that he’d like Harry Sullivan to be written out. Robert disagreed. Harry, he said, was the perfect foil for the Doctor – and a great companion for Sarah. I think ultimately Philip admitted this was true, but by then it was too late. The decision was made – Harry Sullivan was off.

  Filming the studio scenes, especially the ones where Harry is unconscious in hospital, and knowing he was on his way out, were difficult. I still remember getting the news.

  ‘I’m not going to be in it any more, Lissie,’ he told me one day.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll come back.’

  I truly believed he would return. After all, Nick and UNIT came and went. Why wouldn’t Harry?

  In fact, and I didn’t know this at the time, it would be eight years before Nick’s services were required again. Ian, however, would be back far sooner.

  * * *

  I remember when Jon Pertwee went. He himself had set the wheels in motion but by the time the moment came he was devastated to leave. It was when he was going through his lowest ebb that I was offered a new contract. A year later, when my good friend Ian had just been told his contract wouldn’t be renewed, I was offered a deal for a further twenty-two episodes. The question was: did I want to sign?

  It wasn’t just Ian’s situation that muddied the waters: my epiphany from that conversation with Philip during The Sontaran Experiment still lingered. I was in no doubt – I didn’t need this work, it was just another job. The world wouldn’t end if I walked away. I stared at myself in the mirror.

  Come on now, honestly, Sladen, what’s your instinct? What do you want to do?

  I considered it for ages. On the one hand this was my livelihood and I owed it to my husband not to throw away good money because as actors it’s rare that you’re both working at the same time. On the other, it was the perfect springboard to other work. It was make your mind up time. And then the answer came to me.

  I want to carry on.

  * * *

  I signed on 25 March. Tom had added his signature to a contract a few days earlier. That was it; we both were tied in. But what a slog it promised to be. Philip was serious about us working straight through, from Twelve to Thirteen. There would be no break: no summer, no Tangiers.

  So why carry on?

  The feeling I had with Jon when we were doing Peladon – that the stars were suddenly in alignment – was there again. It was a joy to go in to work every day. We didn’t have to work at it any more; any teething troubles in the relationship had vanished. My Sarah and Tom’s Doctor fitted together so naturally, hand in glove. I hope this came across onscreen, although sometimes I wonder if we went too far. When, decades later, I joined Tom to record the DVD commentary for our next serial, Pyramids of Mars, I wondered if we might have been a bit too relaxed! There’s something so comfortable about us together. That story’s definitely one of our better ones and, you know what, when we started filming I was so glad I’d decided to stay.

  Here’s a typical example of our partnership. Tom knows I love films. He was always throwing little lines at me and we’d discuss the old black-and-whites. Scenes from the classics became a kind of shorthand between us. ‘You remember such and such …’, ‘Let’s play it like …’ Once we were waiting to shoot a scene on Pyramids where we had to walk up to a door and enter. Nothing terribly exciting, just one of those bread-and-butter scenes that are so easy to ignore. In the end, I think being in a long-running television show is less about how good you are in the big, confrontational scenes and more about how many different ways you can find to hide behind a rock or fall down a quarry; you have to keep experimenting. That’s where we earn our money, I think. And that was what Tom and I were so good at.

  I saw the twinkle in his eye. Tom’s up to mischief …

  ‘Lissie, you remember the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business?’

  ‘Of course!’ I said.

  ‘Remember the three of them walk silently up to a door, change their minds, and turn in unison and walk away?’

  ‘Yes – they see someone they don’t want to bump into.’

  ‘Why don’t we do that?’

  ‘We’ll never get away with it!’

  ‘Let’s try.’

  He called up to Paddy Russell, back as director, in the gantry. ‘Ma’am …’ – he always called directors ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’ – they seemed to like that – ‘Lis and I have had an idea.’

  They listened, as they always did.

  ‘It’s a great idea,’ Paddy said. ‘But we only have time for one take. That would be too risky.’

  ‘Right you are,’ said Tom.

  But to me he whispered, ‘Shall we do it anyway?’

  ‘Yes!’

  So we did. We had one shot at it, and woe betide us if we messed it up! But it worked perfectly. Nobody said anything afterwards, but they must have been pleased because we didn’t have to reshoot and that’s the version you see on the screen.

  Pulling one over on Paddy was quite rare.

  As much as I loved Jon Pertwee, I think it’s pretty clear his working methods didn’t always suit me – that need of his for control could get a bit out of hand. So when he locked horns with Paddy during Dinosaurs, you felt the blame was probably 50:50 on each side. But then I saw how she got on with Tom.

  As far as I’m concerned, if you’re a director on Doctor Who and you can’t get along with Tom Baker – you can’t get along with anyone.

  Paddy had apparently learned nothing about people skills in the two years since we’d last met. Christ, she could wear you down! You can only go over a scene so many times before you start thinking, I hate this scene, it’s like a piece of meat – if you hit it too much it becomes tasteless. Tom hated that attitude. If you crack something first time, why go on? Paddy seemed to think she wasn’t being thorough enough unless we’d explored every potential direction, every blind alley.

  ‘We’ll just try it one more time …’

  Paddy never admitted defeat, never brooked insubordination. Bernard Archard, who I knew from my old Granada days, was playing Marcus Scarman. I remember bumping into him at lunch one day. He was very dry, very measured.

  ‘I’m being kept in after school today. Are you?’ he asked me.

  I never really got a handle on whether Paddy was like she was because she was aware of being a woman in a man’s world or if she happened to be just like that. One episode during Pyramids made me think there was a bit of a chip at work, though. The script said Sarah fires a rifle and I thought, Fine. When the day came Terry said he’d do it, or a stand-in could. But the director was straight over.

  ‘Lis wants to do it, don’t you, Lis?’

  ‘Er, yeah, Paddy, whatever.’

  From my point of view, the future of the Women’s Liberation Movement would not hinge on whether or not I fired this shot but the gun expert admitted, ‘Paddy really wants you to fire this gun because they think a girl can’t do it.’ How it looked to the outside world was obviously important to her. I really couldn’t care either way. All I wanted to know was whether she needed it played straight or for laughs. The answer was straight – although the end result was debatable.

  I was put in this recess in the wall and handed the weapon. I’d never fired a gun before, never even held one. And this was a bloody big thing. I was shown how to hold it, how to look like I’m taking aim, and how to fire – all in the space of ten minutes. That was the extent
of my training. Where were those interminable rehearsals when you needed them?

  Then Paddy called, ‘Action!’ and I fired.

  God – the noise! I swear I was deaf for three hours. Why the hell didn’t anyone warn me? Where were my earplugs? The gun let off this awesome explosion and of course it just reverberated off the tiny stone enclave. It was awful. As I put the gun down and walked off, I could see people talking to me but they looked like they were miming. I just went away and hid.

  But it’s easy to forget Paddy did some impressive things as well. I was working out my response to seeing Sutekh (an evil Ostirian who planned to destroy all life in the Universe) when she just stopped me. ‘I’d like to show you something at Ealing,’ she said.

  Oh God, I thought. What do I need to go over there for? But off we went.

  When we got to the studios Paddy sat me down in front of a screen and played a series of pre-records she’d already filmed with Gabriel Woolf as Sutekh. At one point I totally leapt out of my seat – much to Paddy’s delight.

  ‘Right,’ she barked. ‘That’s the one we’ll use.’

  For once I appreciated that attention to detail and I was grateful to her for seeking my input.

  * * *

  People often cite Pyramids as one of their favourites and I’ve lost count of the thirty-and forty-somethings that tell me they genuinely hid behind the sofa in 1975 when the Mummies came out. If they only knew what we’d gone through to get there! Not only did we all struggle to get on with Paddy, I know Robert had an ordeal pulling the scripts together in time. In the end I think he wrote so much new material to add to Lewis Greifer’s draft that they shared the pseudonymous credit ‘Stephen Harris’. The pressure really was on with this one.

  Location work commenced at the end of April – a week after Revenge of the Cybermen debuted on BBC1 and with the Mary Whitehouse furore still raging. The location in question was Stargrove Manor in East End, Hampshire – one of several properties owned by Mick Jagger at the time. It sounds glam, but I can promise you that when you’ve stalked every inch of a building’s perimeter for take after take, it loses much of its celebrity allure.

  At least I could wear normal clothes. I felt really sorry for the guys in the Mummy costumes. Something about the design wasn’t right – no one was comfortable inside them. I think it must have been torture stomping around the woods as they had to. At one point Tom had to put one on and that didn’t go well at all. I wasn’t there but I could hear his voice being raised because something wasn’t right. It wasn’t a happy day by any means.

  * * *

  There are a couple of continuity notes from Pyramids which I wonder if people have spotted. One minor detail still makes me smile. Sarah had a nice collection of jewellery but for once I’d decided to wear a piece of my own, this beautiful jade ring.

  There’s a scene where I’m knocking like mad on the door. With Paddy in charge, I couldn’t just do it once, could I? My hand was soon killing me from the various retakes, so I found myself shifting my weight. By the time Paddy said I could stop I thought my hand was going to fall off. Honestly, it was throbbing in agony. As I rubbed some life back into my fingers, though, I noticed my ring was missing its jade stone. I scrabbled around on the floor for a few minutes but no joy. But I didn’t dare say anything to Paddy, of course. If they know it’s gone, I’ll be doing reshoots all day, I thought.

  So if you watch Pyramids I think you can see my ring is there one minute and gone the next – then back again. It’s not a major catastrophe, but I know it would crucify Paddy to realise she’d missed this.

  For us time was always such a rare commodity that you really had to let a lot of things go, even if they weren’t 100 per cent perfect. There’s a scene in Pyramids where an extra almost stumbles over – and we still kept it in. Generally we’d try to get away with the odd pickup shot if something wasn’t quite right. So, for example, in Pyramids, you might be walking down a corridor, knocking. Then you get the call: ‘Hang on, hang on, nobody move, hold it there!’ Depending on where they think it went awry, you can either go back and do the walk again, or do the knock again with that hand. Mostly we just tried to get through the whole scene with as few backward steps as possible.

  Sometimes we’d have stop takes: ‘OK, we’re going to stop that scene halfway through so when you get to that point, just stop. We’ll alter some of the props then you carry on.’ Generally, though, we filmed entire scenes in one go.

  In Pyramids, Sarah ends up trapped in a bell jar but they couldn’t put a bell jar over me. It would have been such a waste of manpower to lift it. The way around it was to put it on afterwards with CSO. So we began the scene, I reached my mark then the shout came: ‘Freeze!’ I couldn’t move or I’d have arms outside the jar. I don’t know how long I was playing statues but it seemed like forever. Then the First’s voice rang out, narrating the final version’s action: ‘Bell jar going on, bell jar over, not long now, bell jar in place – and you can move!’

  When I finally broke my pose there was a cheer from the gantry because I hadn’t moved. That was nice.

  It’s so different – so much better – these days. Time is still the one commodity you never have enough of, but so little is left to chance. On The Sarah Jane Adventures we film multiple angles of every scene as standard. For example, we’ll start with a wide scene that captures everybody, possibly repeating this a couple of times. Then you’ll do the exact same scene from every character’s point of view. So instead of making do with a couple of pickups we actually have the whole scene played out with, let’s say, me in shot for the duration, then Clyde, then Luke, then Rani. Then the editors splice it all together afterwards. I’m sure it’s a lot more work for the technical bods and it’s definitely a lot more work for us because you have to say and do the precise same things over and over but the end results speak for themselves.

  * * *

  When the decision was taken to hold Zygons back as the new season’s opener, Philip was faced with a new quandary: with Pyramids following immediately afterwards he’d be left with two Earthbound adventures in a row. After the Third Doctor’s economical but seemingly endless Earth exile, it was a pattern he was keen not to repeat. So the call was made to switch Pyramids and the next production: Planet of Evil. No one could complain about that story being Earthbound. The whole thing was set on Zeta Minor – a planet at the very end of the universe. And for the first time since Ark in Space, it was shot entirely indoors. It could literally have been anywhere.

  I’ve always enjoyed the buzz of location shoots. That said, if you’re going to shoot indoors for six weeks, you can’t go wrong if some of that time is spent at Ealing Studios. The reason for being at Ealing, as it was with Genesis, was one of scale. Philip elected to pour the whole of a week’s location budget into recreating Zeta Minor in a single expansive studio set. Designer Roger Murray-Leach – the incomparable Roger Murray-Leach – was in on meetings from the beginning. His concept of a colourful, malevolent jungle was a triumph, I think.

  Tom and I loved having a coffee and a laugh with Roger. We formed a great friendship, actually – just one of many on that set. If I’d been a happy bunny on Pyramids, this shoot was off the scale. Looking back, I’d say it was the zenith of my time on Who. I don’t think Tom and I ever got it more perfect than in Planet of Evil. It didn’t matter what was going on in the outside world or even in my own head – those doubts vanished when we were together. The magic of television never seemed more powerful to me.

  I always say Planet of Evil is my favourite serial, but I do wonder if that’s because I had such a blast making it. When I sat down to do the commentary for the DVD the happy memories came flooding back. The performances are so chatty, so natural, as though they’re not scripted at all, and that typifies how we felt at the time. But I do wonder, with hindsight, if we were having too much fun, if there wasn’t the odd moment of, ‘Oh, you’re dying? Right, I’d better do something about that then.’ I’ll let ot
her people decide for themselves.

  Once again we had Maloney in the director’s chair, which just made the event so enjoyable. Bless him – he’s another one no longer with us. I loved him dearly, truly I did, and always had a fantastic time in his company. Like Tom, he had a sense of humour, very left of centre. He would always come out with the most unexpected line. Other times he could be very direct. I remember overhearing him talking to Andrew Rose, my costume designer on Evil.

  ‘Look, can we make Sarah look a bit more like a girl?’

  Hysterical!

  He was right, though. The whole ‘journalist’ persona had been well enough established by then – I didn’t need to keep the suits on anymore to be seen as a ‘serious’ woman. In fact, I was already beginning to have a bit more fun with her, to play around a lot more. Sarah had been so strait-laced with Jon and now it was time to let her hair down. We began to find a lot more frilly things for her to wear, the more outlandish the better. After all, I thought, She’s travelling in space now. Who’s to say what’s smart on other planets?

  She’s whizzing around the universe in the TARDIS, meeting aliens with eight legs, one eye, fur, clothes, gaudy robes – you name it. Why couldn’t she become a bit more off the wall? So in Planet of Evil I wore a bodice, nothing like I’d ever worn in the show before. And espadrilles – they were all the rage then – cut-off jeans, a short-sleeve puffed jacket. It wasn’t quite so outlandish as Hand of Fear, but we were heading in that direction.

  The thing about clothes, of course, is that they can alter your behaviour. It wasn’t planned when I first picked up the script, but I’m sure Sarah is a bit more girly when she’s in more of a fun costume. It seems so natural, why fight it?

  I’ve been thinking about the quality of the scripts on Planet of Evil because, as I sit here now, the serial’s writer Louis Marks has just died. It’s very sad seeing those faces from my past fade away. At least with DVDs and videos a bit of them lives on.