sir_guinglain

Jackie Lane has died aged seventy-nine. She played Dodo Chaplet, travelling companion to William Hartnell's Doctor in Doctor Who, between Bell of Doom, the fourth and final part of the story the scripts and Doctor Who Magazine call The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve but which BBC Studios call The Massacre (26 February 1966) and The War Machines episode 2 (2 July 1966). Her character was created by a producer and story editor - John Wiles and Donald Tosh - who were exiting Doctor Who after their plans for the series were frustrated by the established character of the programme and the expectations of their managers. Dodo was written out as soon as was practical, unceremoniously being dropped by the new producer and story editor - Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis - less than half-way through The War Machines after Dodo was taken over by the supercomputer WOTAN and deprogrammed by the Doctor. Despite ever-shifting ideas about who Dodo was and how she should behave, Jackie Lane invested Dodo with humour, morality and bravery, and while she had little public interaction with Doctor Who fandom, only I think making one convention appearance, her contribution to the programme gained respect over the years as her episodes were released on video, DVD and audio. She was a point of brightness in a difficult time for the programme. Later in her career she was Tom Baker's voice agent, managing his successful career in advertising voiceovers.

Did I like Dodo? It's difficult to say, because I've only known the character as a mystery to be pieced together, not properly introduced in the second edition of The Making of Doctor Who, the first place I met her. Jackie Lane's biography was confused too, as nwhyte explored many years ago now. The character is overshadowed by the drama behind the scenes, at least for me. Yet she successfully renews the Doctor's compassion, damaged by the experience of The Daleks' Master Plan and exposed by his apparent indifference to the fate of the Huguenots of Paris in The Massacre, and renewed the 'space waif' granddaughter model of companion while reaching out to the contemporary model which would be better-realised later in 1966 in Anneke Wills's Polly. Jackie Lane made Dodo enthusiastic and innocent and helped bring back a sense of joy to the series. I wish we could see all her episodes, but we have some record of all her Doctor Who performances and that is very rare for mid-1960s BBC television popular drama.

For reasons clear to anyone who studies his Twitter feed and interactions, veteran Doctor Who fan Ian Levine is keen to make it known that this short series of articles published in DWB in 1992 is available to read online. It's been supplemented and superseded by other work, such as Richard Molesworth's DWM articles and the two editions of his book Wiped published by Telos, and by the ongoing work by the BroaDWcast site, but it's still readable and tells Levine's side of the story as well as convey how horrified first-generation Doctor Who fandom was when they learned that episodes which they often remembered from childhood and which they imagined survived at some BBC vault no longer existed, with anecdotes of early fandom and the dawn of home video.