Sladen, Elisabeth - Elisabeth Sladen - The Autobiography

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 scripts 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.