When we turned up in Wales at the beginning of May, I couldn’t help smiling at the new TARDIS. I’d been right – if they could change that, they certainly wouldn’t have thought twice about losing me. It transpired, however, that the changes had gone too far. The trusty old police box was actually painted the wrong shade of blue and had to be re-sprayed – at least the roof stayed on this time!
It wasn’t just the outside that had been tinkered with, though. There was even a new TARDIS control room waiting when we got back to the studio. To explain this there’s a nice scene where Tom and I wander through the TARDIS and find the old console. We all just assume the old girl is infinitely huge inside so it’s nice occasionally to give viewers a glimpse. And we also get to see the Doctor’s boot room, I think, and of course in Matt Smith’s first episode the library falls into the swimming pool. I might have stayed longer if I’d discovered that room!
Usually we only had a handful of extras and perhaps one stuntman on each serial but for The Masque of Mandragora (as it was eventually called after a host of earlier names), we had the full retinue. As usual, Terry Walsh led the team and then we had Max Faulkner and Stuart Fell – such an apt name for a stuntman. Terry did his usual job of doubling for Tom, but Stuart got another part: as the entertainer. I knew those circus skills would come in useful one day. But the reason we needed everybody this time was the horses. Sixteenth-century Europe bolted around on four legs – and therefore, so did we. We’d never had horses before and God, were they huge! I think it was the first time the stunt team and extras outnumbered the cast.
It was funny being there and everyone knowing I’d decided to leave. I remember one of the crew – I won’t name him – said, ‘Have you got anything else lined up?’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You’re very brave.’
I didn’t get that attitude. ‘Well, no, you know when it’s time to go. You know when the time is right. You can’t stick around just for the money, no one should do that,’ I told him.
I could see we’d have to agree to differ on that one.
Back in London again we had a fortnight to prepare for the first studio session. Before that, however, my life was about to go under the spotlight.
The BBC were announcing my departure.
I don’t know what governs the timing of these things. All I do know is that I wasn’t expecting one iota of the furore it created. Phone calls, and not just from Mum and Dad, bombarded the flat (I remember Mum being very concerned about my future income: ‘Oh, Elisabeth, you’re not leaving, are you? Dad and I are very worried.’) Strangers stopped me in the street to ask if it was true. And, most bizarre of all, the Daily Mail put me on their front page. Their front page! When Tom was announced as the Doctor he made page one of the London Evening Standard – I’d gone national. I even got an invite to appear on Nationwide, the country’s daily evening news programme. It was absolutely mind-blowing.
I remember being at home before the press release went out. I was washing my hair when Brian called out, ‘There’s someone from the press at the door. They want to know if you’re leaving.’
‘I’m washing my hair, tell him to go away!’ I said.
I honestly can’t remember if I discussed my decision with Brian beforehand, but obviously he had heard me moaning about the show for the usual reasons for ages. He was terribly supportive – the regular income didn’t matter at all, that’s not what we were in acting for. We were always quite vagabond-like, moving from place to place, job to job. This was just the next step on the stones.
* * *
By the time we knuckled down to studio work on 23 May I was still a bit shell-shocked by all the attention. All I’d said was ‘I’m quitting a TV show’ – I was just an actress, after all. Apparently other people didn’t see it so simply. Press interest was nothing like it would be today but it was still massive. Who, when, why, what? I had every conceivable question thrown at me. My agent was handling more interview enquiries than he knew what to do with. After a while of being asked the same questions, of course, you start to trot out the same rehearsed responses. For example, I remember more than once being asked what advice I’d give my successor. Remembering the scene in The Seeds of Doom where I was tied up and thrown into a deadly threshing machine, I joked, ‘It will help if they like bondage.’ That, of course, won me even more publicity. Apparently children’s TV stars shouldn’t talk like that.
Mandragora wrapped for me at the start of June. It had been fun. All I could think of, though, was, Four episodes down, four more to go …
* * *
The Hand of Fear, my last story, had originally been intended as the closer to Season Thirteen. But by running late and moving to the second serial of Season Fourteen it had lost two episodes. That didn’t bother me – all I cared about was getting to the end.
This is the home straight, nearly there.
When I think back to how Jon soon regretted his resignation, I realise I was the opposite. I’d given as much as I could to the show; that was the best I could do. If I’d stayed, there was always the risk that it would have gone downhill. It was so exhilarating to leave on a high. Not to think, Oh, it’s not as good as it was. It was empowering, actually. I felt in control – and you can’t always say that in this profession.
Unusually, the first scenes we filmed were actually the first ones broadcast. And like a knowing nod to all the time I’d spent in one during my time on Who, they were set in a quarry – this time in Cromhall, Gloucestershire. From the moment I arrived to start filming, I was already aware the script asked for me to be buried under rubble. Now, depending on who the director is, this might be interpreted in a number of ways. Unfortunately for me, our director was the blood-thirsty Lennie Mayne.
And he fancied the literal interpretation.
It was quite a big deal when they blew the rocks up – it doesn’t matter how often you see them, dynamite and explosives always catch the eye. But then yours truly had to be buried underneath. Lennie was all for keeping me down there for as long as possible so he could get the perfect shot. Luckily for me, our First on that one was Marion McDougall. She’d been on Spiders, Ark, The Sontaran Experiment and Android as well. If you had Marion as your First, you knew it would be a good day at the office.
I had to lie on the ground and when Lennie called ‘Action!’ the rocks started to fall on top of me. Literally. They weren’t huge, they weren’t going to crush me to death. But it was terrifying and I felt every single one hit my body. I desperately covered my head with my hands for protection but even though I could stop the rocks hitting my face I couldn’t do anything about the dust. I could feel it coating my lungs with every breath. I’d never known claustrophobia before but another minute and I would have, I’m convinced. I remember thinking, You’d better get the shot, Lennie, because there won’t be a second take.
I’d been in there for God knows how long when I heard Marion say, ‘Lennie, I think Lis should come out now.’
‘What’s that?’ he asked, completely distracted by his camera angles. ‘Nah, nah, don’t you worry, Mother’s all right in there, she’s fine! Tell her to relax, we’ll just do one more.’
‘No,’ Marion replied, ‘I’m getting her out now, Lennie! Getting her out!’
They were a perfect match – Marion would look after you really well while Lennie was such fun. I still see Marion sometimes, always a pleasure to catch up with her. Unfortunately, Lennie died in quite tragic circumstances not long after we wrapped. He loved sailing and one day took his boat out in the fog and never came home. They found the boat but not Lennie – I think he was washed overboard. It’s a tragic, terrible waste of life and my heart went out to Pidge and their two daughters.
It was only Tom and me at the quarry but the full complement had arrived by the time we made it to Oldbury-on-Severn, just up the road, a few days later. No quarries this time – just a bloody great nuclear power station. Sometimes you look at these s
cripts and think, Well, it says we use it, but obviously it will all be in a studio.
Think again, Sladen.
Oldbury Power Station had been operational for nine years by the time we arrived. As far as I was concerned, it was just another location. You get driven somewhere, deliver your lines and go home; that was as complicated as I liked things to get. This one was just the same. It was only afterwards that I thought about how we were swept down with Geiger counters on the way out every day as a precaution. It sounds naïve but I had no idea that place was radioactive. What if one of the girls had been pregnant, for God’s sake? I wouldn’t have gone in if I’d known but we didn’t have a clue. I just trolled onto the coach as usual, asking no questions, head in the clouds, la la la. Do the job, back to the hotel for a drink and a laugh afterwards.
I heard later that we got Oldbury because Hand of Fear’s writers, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, live nearby. They kept that quiet, the buggers! It would have been nice to pop in for a cup of tea.
One of the thrills of boarding the location bus, with your clothes case in hand, was never quite knowing who you’d find on there. For The Hand of Fear I was delighted to see Rex Robinson, who’d been Gebek in Peladon. Rex was never short of an anecdote or a kind word. Mr Versatile, Roy Skelton, was on board as well, unrecognisable as usual as King Rokon. Roy was always such fun on set – I don’t know why they don’t use him now. His voices just flow from him, without gizmos – and it wasn’t only monsters. Sadie used to love the kids’ show Rainbow and of course Roy would do the voices of Zippy and George. When they did Christmas shows with the cast’s Rod, Jane and Freddie, she got to meet Zippy and still has all sorts of things signed by him.
And then there was brilliant Glyn Houston – he really enjoyed himself. If I’m honest, I don’t think Hand of Fear was particularly well put together. In places it felt like a draft rather than a polished final script. It probably wasn’t the best episode to go out on because there were one or two boring scenes, but Glyn really enlivened them. He was exceptional value.
I have to take some of the blame for the pace of the thing. This was the second serial, after Android, where I wasn’t playing myself so you’d think I might have been used to it by then. For those who haven’t seen it, the explosion at the quarry unearths the fossilised hand of Eldrad, a criminal from millennia past. Sarah’s touch reignites its life and as a result, she is possessed by Eldrad. I think I should have played those scenes much more quickly; I remember toying around with it and no one said to do it differently so that’s the direction I took. I don’t think I’d do it that way again. That whole performance is far from one of my favourites. It’s just so slow, especially those lines, ‘Eldrad must live! Eldrad must live!’ There were a dozen ways to take it and unfortunately I opted for the wrong one.
Despite my personal reservations, it seems to be a very popular serial. Believe it or not, the single most requested line I’m asked to quote for fans is ‘Eldrad must live!’. Bizarre, isn’t it? Of all the thousands of words Sarah must have said. I remember being at a convention in LA, in the lift on the way up to my room, and this guy got in. He must have been from the convention because it was clear he was nearly fainting with excitement behind me. I couldn’t ignore it, so I turned round and gave him a smile.
‘Please,’ he begged me, ‘please just say “Eldrad must live!” I won’t get out until you say it.’
Absolutely true!
So I said it – in that ridiculous slow-mo delivery – and he got out at the next floor, the happiest man in California.
Apart from the exposure to radioactivity, the power station proved a challenging location in other ways. There were so many platforms and ladders running all over the place that it would have been remiss not to incorporate them, but during the final chase scene I thought my legs were going to drop off. I was going up and down, up and down this bloody metal ladder, literally quivering with exhaustion by the end of it. There was a rail all the way up but I wasn’t allowed to fall on it for help and it was really steep. The next day I could barely walk, my quads were screaming in agony. You’d just make it to the top then you’d hear bloody Lennie, ‘Lis, could you do it again but this time …’ It was really horrendous.
At least they could see me coming. I still get letters today about my outfit for The Hand of Fear – my ‘Andy Pandy’ costume as I call Sarah’s red top, striped dungarees and little cap.
I remember saying to our costume girl, Barbie Lane, ‘Do you know what? It’s the end of the road, she could wear anything. Let’s just go to town on it.’
There was a shop in Kensington High Street called Bus Stop, quite small but very trendy at the time. Barbie bought these red-and-white pantaloons and I said, ‘Brilliant, but how can we make them our own?’ So we sewed stars onto the front, just to make them different from the rest on the hangers.
And we didn’t stop there. We got this coat and tied a bandana around me. Then we found a top and socks plus a hat to match. It was pretty extraordinary but I thought, Why not? It’s Sarah’s last stand. I’m going to go for gold in this episode. Rationally, she’s been with the Doctor for so long, seen so many unimaginable sights, that she’s totally lost it as far as Earth clothes are concerned; that’s what the Doctor’s done to her. After all, space travel has very many strange effects on the human brain and form.
I wanted to underline the transformation of a Doctor’s companion. By then I was no longer the Sarah Jane with the suit and the shoulder bag who had gone in – I wasn’t even the Sarah Jane who’d worn that body-warmer in Morbius! I had experienced so much, I’d evolved, and that was reflected in my clothes.
After a busy few days we headed for our third outdoor location, a park in Thornbury. This was to be a tricky one, probably the trickiest of them all. There weren’t any stunts or vast cast ensembles to rehearse with; nobody had to wear an alien costume or act against a blue screen. All of those things would have been preferable to this. Because this was the day I filmed my goodbye.
I was content that Sarah wasn’t being married or killed off – the same thing, some might think. Either of those would have seemed too neat. Sarah was never neat – she was a maverick, I always thought. As close to the Doctor in her unpredictability as any human could be. So she wasn’t about to go out in a blaze of laser fire or an exploding castle: she would simply open the TARDIS door and walk away.
But how to make that believable?
When I received the script, I was appalled. It was as if the writers had never watched Sarah and the Doctor before.
She can’t bow out like this, it’s not right, I thought.
In their defence, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, the writers, had decided the moment was too big for them so they’d simply sketched an outline and Robert had fleshed it out. But I didn’t realise this at first – I just saw a clunky, monosyllabic exchange that made me see red. I was so upset that I scrawled rude words all over it. Childish, I know, but when I picked up that pen the emotion just gushed out. Maybe I was more discombobulated about my imminent departure than I was ready to admit.
Fortunately, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes agreed.
‘There are only two people who know how the Doctor and Sarah would handle this,’ they said to me and Tom, ‘and it’s you.’
I didn’t see that coming, but what an honour. And they were absolutely right: Tom and I were the keepers of these precious characters. We lived them every day, every week for nine months or more each year.
As I recall, the plot get-out Robert had come up with was that the Doctor had been summoned back to Gallifrey – home planet of the Time Lords, where no humans were allowed – so he would be forced to drop Sarah off in Croydon. That was fine. Even at the end of The Seeds of Doom, after all, Sarah had been angling to get home. She was after a breather from the action as well – but how to make it real?
Tom and I put a lot of thought into this. It was terribly liberating. ‘What about …?’
‘No, he wouldn’
t do that. But what about …?’
‘No, she’d run a mile!’
It went on like that all afternoon. And then we realised what was missing …
The cameras rolled and we delivered the most heartfelt lines of our careers. It was two whole pages – a lot bearing in mind we filmed about eight or nine a day normally.
So what did we come up with in the end? It was quite straight-forward, actually.
Sarah said, ‘Don’t forget me.’
‘Oh, Sarah, don’t you forget me,’ the Doctor replied.
Then: ‘until we meet again,’ from him and Sarah agrees, but too emotional to speak, she just hmm-hmms. Then she scoops up her possessions – including a tennis racquet and that yellow Mac – tells a Labrador ‘He blew it!’ when she realises it’s not Croydon and skips off, whistling ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow’.
The dog was a last-minute addition. Maybe Lennie was looking for something for his wife to do, because Pidge was the hound-handler. You can read these things in so many ways. Some fans think the ‘Bow Wow’ song was put in to prepare us for K-9 – it doesn’t matter that the Fourth Doctor’s robotic dog hadn’t even been invented yet.
Some people look for connections everywhere. I’m the other extreme. Shamefully, years later, I would perform a touching tribute to Sarah’s final scene with David Tennant – and not even realise …
Despite the pressure on Tom and me to complete such an impassioned scene, it went very smoothly. In fact, it was great to do. Sometimes you’re in a swirl, like a wave, and you just do it and it works. There’s nothing I’d change – we did what we set out to.
Disappointed as I was with the overall story, I was pretty proud of my exit so I kept the script with those passages and all my rude messages. Apart from the odd costume or accessory it’s the only thing I did hang onto from my Who days. (I know what you’re thinking – and I’m sorry!) Years later, it would go to a very deserving home …
* * *
Recording my farewell scene in the opening week of shooting got it neatly out of the way. Going into the studio sessions after that, the pressure was off. Other problems, however, presented themselves.
Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography Page 24