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.

Farewell to an extraordinary actor. Maximum power, always.

It's hardly an original subject for a post, and the sentiments which I will express aren't particularly new either. As I was told tonight, when I described Armstrong's death as 'sad news' it was for a given value of sad. Neil Armstrong lived a full and remarkable life. For those of us who grew up in the shadow of that walk on the moon[1], though, the end of Armstrong's life seems like the end of a promise. I recalled the articles in children's magazines of the 1970s which envisaged that by now there would be commercial, routine journeys by astronauts who would train in an environment which would make the Apollo astronauts' experiences look prehistoric. This optimism seems far-fetched now, though I am out of the loop as far as space exploration is concerned, and commercial spaceflight is at least becoming a reality. I hope, for the sake of those now distant times, that human beings walk on other worlds later this century.

[1]...and only a shadow; I can only remember the afterword of the Apollo programme, Apollo-Soyuz.

Richard Carpenter, creator of Robin of Sherwood, died at the weekend. I first encountered him on BBC schools television as the host and writer of the Look and Read serial Cloudburst; aimed at slow-reading eight-year-olds this series was essential viewing for the literate pre-schooler in the 1970s. His credits as a writer of family television series for ITV were long - Catweazle, The Ghosts of Motley Hall, Dick Turpin and of course Robin of Sherwood. He also wrote the first series of The Scarlet Pimpernel for the BBC in the late 1990s, but while he started work on the second, the transmitted series was credited to other hands. I remember Mark Ryan, Nasir in Robin, praising 'Kip''s imagination when he visited the Oxford Arthurian Society in 1995. A few years later I went to a National Film Theatre retrospective of Carpenter's work. He deserves more attention than he receives.

The brief news reports are celebrating Only Fools and Horses; but I was always more of a Citizen Smith man, or rather boy. As a child I took Citizen Smith largely straight, attracted by the idea of a bedroom revolutionary (not surprising, really); though part of the success of the series is that the audience is gradually drawn into Wolfie Smith's world, to the extent that by the time he, Ken and Speed (and Tucker too?) storm the House of Commons with a stolen tank only to find an empty chamber (a CSO slide, of course) it's still difficult not to feel utterly disappointed for them. The post-prison series disappointed me when it was first broadcast - when I was nine or so - but I think I'd warm to it now, as Wolfie matures and finds more realistic targets and is forced to go on the run when he actually makes steps to making Tooting a better place to live (though being found in the bedroom of the local gangster's wife also had something to do with it).

Just Good Friends wasn't all that bad either, though the sexual dynamic has badly dated at least in the first two series; I've not seen the third, but remember it as more self-consciously fantastical, with a subplot involving Paul Nicholas's Vince (who under the Nicholas performance is not very far removed from David Jason's Del Trotter in Only Fools...) illegally selling arms to African dictators.

I don't know what to say, really. My sister remarks that her first memory is of Sarah watching as Eldrad's hand regenerates and reanimates at the end of part one of The Hand of Fear. Elisabeth Sladen's Sarah Jane Smith was the perfect Doctor Who assistant and a touchstone of reliability and dedication in the face of otherworldly adversity for more than one generation. This is a great shock; to say she will be widely missed is an understatement. Her husband Brian Miller and daughter Sadie will be in everyone's thoughts.