Doctor, you go around fighting evil wherever you can,
but you do it with some girls...
There are people who want to suffer and they enJoy suffering.
And it was Just, ''Scream!'' You know. And it was like, ''Okay.''
I don't think I'm playing a sex symbol.
I must be mad! I'm sick of being cold and wet
and hypnotised left, right and centre!
I'm sick of being shot at, savaged by bug-eyed monsters,
never knowing if I'm coming or going or been!
And boy, am I sick of that sonic screwdriver!
I think there are so many reasons why the Doctor needs a companion.
In terms of the piece itself, without a companion,
the stories would never have a balance.
If it was Just the Doctor kind of being in danger
and getting himself out of scrapes,
then that may not work quite as well as the people that he cares about.
The show is an adventure serial,
and in that kind of format, somebody needs to be an assistant.
So somebody does need to pass test tubes over,
somebody does need to ask what's going on, where they are,
somebody does need to get into trouble.
I think most people lead pretty boring lives, basically.
So the opportunity to Just leave your whole life behind
and go into the unknown is on one hand very exciting,
on the other hand, it would be totally fearful and unthinkable for most people.
I've got a choice.
Stay at home with my mum, my boyfriend, my Job.
Or chuck it all in for danger and monsters and life or death.
We talk about the companions as are they important, what role are they?
But in the beginning, they were all important.
It was the story of Ian and Barbara
and their tale of how to get back to 20th-century Earth.
BRYANT: As originally the series was devised,
the idea was to have different characters from different generations,
so that it really did appeal as a family show.
I suppose I was, you would say, the dashing action man.
I keep calling him an action man
simply because my children always called it that.
And the Doctor was Just a couple of lines.
It was their story.
But the moment they left, the very next story, The Time Meddler,
was about the Doctor and his origins.
I think the companion fulfils lots of different roles.
And I think the main role that they're there for is to
be the audience identification figure.
And reacting how your average person would react,
which is generally Just to kind of freak out about it all.
''This is nuts!''
It's the thing that the viewer's sitting at home saying, ''No! Don't do that!''
(SCREAMING)
Let's not forget that the Doctor is an alien
and he has seen a lot of these things before,
a lot of these types of situations before
and can be quite blasé about them.
BRYANT: I think frequently the companion is there to curtail
the activities of the Doctor, to make sure
that the companion is the voice of reason.
Yeah, I mean, there is a level of ''Is Rory Jiminy Cricket?''
You know what's dangerous about you?
It's not that you make people take risks,
it's that you make them want them to impress you.
K-9 was the Doctor's only robot pet.
It has been said there are lots of human pets
which get patronised more than K-9.
Men who surround themselves with attractive younger women
see them as trophies. They don't really care about these women.
But, you know, they like them to admire him.
So actually, it's a kind of narcissistic thing to do.
And one of the disadvantages of doing this
is that it's very difficult for these type of males
to have long-lasting relationships.
You don't see them as a kind of loving, romantic relationship.
And we're really going to go looking for dragons?
Too risky, if you ask me.
One of the maJor characteristics of personality
is openness to new experience.
And people who are high on these traits, they get very bored with routine.
And the worst thing that can happen to them is a nine-to-five Job.
And at the same time,
they really have a high appetite for exciting, novel things.
So you can imagine that if you're really high on openness,
you would like to travel with the Doctor.
Because it's the epitome of a novel adventure.
Ace!
You could have a very boring life and never leave home
and never do anything with your life.
Or you could go to university.
You know, university's scary but you do it if you want the experience.
Moving to a different country is scary
but you do it if you want the experience.
And I think the profile of people who apply to be part in reality TV shows,
like Big Brother or any reality TV show, really, is quite similar
to the profile of people who want to travel with the Doctor.
Because they're willing to expose themselves to the unknown.
They're willing to be potentially a victim
of complete, you know, unexpected,
novel and probably dangerous experiences as well.
DARVILL: (LAUGHING) If I was in the same situation?
I don't know, maybe I would've had a nervous breakdown by now.
But then I don't know, I think we all have a sense of adventure.
And I'd like to think that mine's pretty high.
As well as being scared and terrified about the whole thing,
you have to still Jump in with both feet.
To play a Doctor who companion, even when they're incredibly vulnerable,
you have to play them as resilient and strong characters,
because otherwise you feel like you got no...
You're not in touch with reality at all while playing these parts.
It's very hard to say what's the worst thing that ever happened to Peri,
because so many dreadful things happened to her.
I did try to catalogue them all
and I don't know how you would sort of remain sane.
If they did react normally, if Doctor who was real,
they'd be screaming and wetting themselves and crying
and hiding as far into the ship as they possibly could by story two.
Bearing in mind, certainly the way I've always thought about it is
that what we see are their very few snippets
and that they actually spend weeks and weeks going around nice forest planets
and going to spas and things like that.
And they have a lot of fun.
And then very occasionally have these terrifying adventures.
(SCREAMING)
There has been an element of screaming.
They have to create terror and fear and shouty, screamy stuff for the monsters
because the Doctor can't whimper, only Patrick Troughton.
I remember the first time I had to do a long, long scream.
It was, uh, we were running out of time,
and Fiona Cummings had Just said to me, ''Right, an end of episode scream!''
And I asked, ''What am I screaming at?''
-Contact has been made! -(SCREAMING)
(LAUGHING)
Everything that you react to, it's slightly different.
And there wasn't any time for an explanation
and I realised I'd been a very tedious actress by asking.
RUSSELL: Carol left because she felt that she was always...
''No!'' Screaming and going, ''Help!'' You know. That's all she did.
I was constantly getting scripts that said, ''Leela screamed,''
and I'd be crossing it out.
You have to scream. It isn't demeaning.
If you see a five-headed monster, I would scream now, you know?
I don't find that a problem. And if it needs it for the cliffhanger,
and if the cliffhanger is me, yes please, I'd do it.
(SCREAMING)
I've never really seen a problem with the screaming.
If I am scared by something, I scream, and I think it's natural.
(SCREAMING)
There'd be days when, you know, you'd get to lunch and go,
''God, I have Just been screaming and shouting all morning.''
Most people in those situations will feel anxious and that's good anxiety,
because it protects you from potential threats and dangers.
But if you habituate to this,
you become so fearless that you might be basically at risk.
At times you do feel a bit of a fool but that's part of the Job.
(SCREAMING)
Is there a secret to reacting-acting? No.
And if there was, I'd like to know.
-Now what? -Look!
I never found, really, the reacting to things particularly difficult.
I'm not a TVcharacter, this is really happening.
You have to take each scene and each moment as it comes
and yes, there is a lot of reacting to stuff.
(BOTH SCREAMING)
There's not too many occasions where where we are Just staring at nothing.
It's hard but you know, there's much harder things in the world to do.
Did you see that?
Well the companions have a role, don't they?
They explain things to the audience.
-I don't get it. -Where is it?
What does the Zero Room look like?
-What are you doing? -What are all these knobs?
There are many times when I felt,
''Oh no, I've got to ask this silly question.''
(GASPING) ''Doctor, what is it? Oh, what is it, Doctor?''
I mean, how many ways can you interpret that line?
There are times when I'd read the script, and go,
''I'm Just asking stupid questions.''
But I think I've kind of revelled in that somewhat.
(READING) ''Please save me from the monsters?''
Who sent that?
Is everything okay? What happened to the lift?
But I think you have to genuinely be interested.
I think that's the only way that you can play it.
They need to often explain the plots to the audience.
Such as Nyssa in Logopolis.
When the Doctor falls off the telescope and the Watcher merges with him,
thankfully there's a voiceover from Nyssa going,
''So he was the Doctor all the time.''
And Tegan is a character who has lots of very odd lines.
Look, there's a fan-light above the door!
What's that for?
It's a window to give natural light onto the passage.
Your demand for energy is causing an overload.
I'm beginning to understand the problems of this planet.
What with all the deaths, accountable and unaccountable.
There's a brilliant one in one story where she says
quite slowly into a mirror,
-''While you were enJoying 48 hours'...'' -...peaceful sleep
in the delta wave augmenter,
my mind was...occupied.
You are the audience, you know, the Doctor is the main character
and you are the one asking the questions so you must ask those questions.
I quite like that element of Rory, that he is constantly questioning,
constantly going, ''Now, hang on a second. I do want to make sure that...''
You know, he'd definitely get holiday insurance.
What single women in their late teens have in common
is they tend to be more vulnerable,
a little bit insecure and more fearful.
So I think it's quite unusual and somewhat ironic
that that's the favourite travel companion for the Doctor.
Well, you know there are a lot of hormones
pumping through you in your teens
that make you do, you know, teenagers drive carelessly.
They do a lot of dangerous things.
So I think the idea of Just going off and doing something
might initially appeal to that dangerous side.
However, to stay for as long as most of the companions stay,
I think you have to look at the reason,
not Just why you'd stay but why you'd leave everything else behind.
I think if you come from a background that is, let's say a toxic environment,
what these type of women with these profiles
can actually like in the Doctor is that there is a
kind of almost like a substitute figure.
Somebody who is challenging them and taking them
to more turbulent times and places.
But actually somebody who they feel protected by.
I wrote this huge background to Peri, which I gave to JNT.
And said, ''This is where I feel she's come from, blah, blah, blah.''
And he read it and said, ''I think it's brilliant! Superb! You Just play that.''
I don't think that there has to be abuse
in the sense that it could be perceived as.
But I think that probably Howard took up all of her mother's attention.
And originally, JNT and I had come across the idea
that Peter Davison very much looked like she remembered her father.
So her father she hadn't seen for a long, long time.
He probably died when she was young.
Of course, since he then disappears,
fairly quickly, and becomes a completely different personality.
Then you start asking, ''Okay, why is she still here?''
There are orphans and there are people and there are children
whose families have been destroyed Joining the Doctor.
And that's less problematic than someone Just simply dancing into the Tardis
and saying, ''You know, show me a good time.''
For example, Victoria, who, in her first story,
loses her dad after her mum is already dead.
She's been held prisoner by the Daleks for however long.
A week later, she's pratting about in a miniskirt on the planet Telos.
In the case of Victoria, you know,
it's very difficult to interpret this.
Why would somebody, after going through this incredible sequence of events,
dress up in a miniskirt?
I guess it's some kind of regression to childhood, you know,
wanting to be naive?
But the fact that Victoria and her family were fleeing from the Daleks
and the devastation of the Daleks,
the fact that she was in danger the next episode
says okay, she's with the Doctor and it's an adventure and she's scared
but the Doctor has taken her on board ship, he's rescued an orphan.
So there is that moral ambiguity, the Doctor puts his companions in danger,
which is being addressed in the current show with Rory and Amy.
Yeah, me and Karen, when we first started to discuss
what our background was and what our...
As far as what I've decided with Rory is
that he has a kind of slightly absent family and they're not a horrible family
but I don't think he has a close relationship with them.
Which makes it easier to be able to disappear for years on end.
So the fact that most companions don't have any contact
with their past life,
I think it indicates that they must have left something rather unpleasant behind.
Because if you see the Doctor rescuing a companion from something dreadful,
it's less problematic when the Doctor takes them
somewhere else that's dreadful.
I think my favourite is Nyssa,
who becomes a companion for no reason whatsoever.
She's in a story, at the end of which her dad is taken over by the Master.
The following story, the Watcher brings her to Logopolis,
not really sure why, and luckily he does because then her planet's destroyed.
She gets one line.
The Master killed my stepmother and then my father.
And now the world that I grew up in.
And it's never really mentioned again.
And what it does is it's shorthand. I think it gives them...
It cuts off all their ties to their previous life
so that they can then go off and have these adventures.
Adric died,
but would he have died if the Doctor hadn't turned up in Alzarius?
The Doctor took in an orphan and he took him on lots of adventures
and Adric died and that's very sad.
But he had a bit of a problematic life when he started.
I think there's this ambiguity.
On one hand there's the experience of fear and going to unknown places
but on the other hand, it might make them feel
more safe than they ever did before, at least when they were growing up.
I don't think companions are necessarily written to be crazy.
I think there's a laudable aim to give a companion a thing.
I mean, in the 80's, every companion seemed to have
a different lesson on the timetable.
Nyssa was into electro-bionetics or whatever
and Tegan was into aerodynamics and Peri was into botany.
I don't know what Turlough was into, probably PE,
and Adric was into maths.
We're going to make them three-dimensional
in a very two dimensional way. So they look insane!
My name's Tegan Jovanka! I'd like to speak to the pilot!
Tegan, she's constantly obsessed with planes.
And she's always going on about them as if she'd never seen one before,
despite getting a Job as an air stewardess.
And she never takes off her air stewardess's uniform.
Although the fasten seatbelt sign is now off,
we suggest that you keep your seatbelt fastened when seated.
I saw a Concorde once on the tarmac at Melbourne.
You Just don't get this sort of silly aggravation with aircraft.
Is that supposed to be Heathrow? Doesn't look much like Heathrow to me.
-That's Heathrow Airport! -You're right.
Crazy idiot of a pilot!
I think she must have had quite a hard time
playing that constantly for two years.
I don't really belong at ground level, Aunt Vanessa.
There are several studies in psychology that show that people
who are obsessed with aviation and planes and flying
and, you know, who literally would look at the sky all the time to see planes,
they have two main characteristics.
One, they're quite dreamy and detached from reality,
so they literally live in a different world,
and secondly, they're quite aspirational and ambitious.
I sometimes think you should've been born with wings!
Maybe she Just really loved aeroplanes.
But it's no more weird than Rose going,
''Hey, isn't it fabulous? It's a big laugh!
''I'm fighting a werewolf in the middle, I'm making Jokes about Queen Victoria
''and it's hilarious!''
And you're going, ''You're not acting quite normal, either.''
You become addicted to it.
Excitement, fun and danger are more addictive than most other things.
-Gas-mask zombies! -Real, living dinosaurs!
-Real, living werewolf! -The Loch Ness Monster!
Seriously?
It becomes your kind of lifestyle.
And then anything else, by contrast, becomes really boring.
Ace is an interesting example to end the classic series on.
I'm not scared of anything.
It was like, ''Yes, you don't like clowns, let's find some clowns.
''So, you don't like haunted houses, let's find one,
''see how dangerous they can be!''
Exposing somebody to the very obJect they fear is what
cognitive behavioural therapists and psychologists do with their patients.
I haven't got no mum and dad.
I've never had no mum and dad and I don't want no mum and dad!
It's Just me! All right?
If you've had bad experiences with your parents,
the worst thing you want to do is relive those experiences.
But actually, that's the best thing you can do,
'cause it will show you that you can cope with it.
The baby is your mother!
So if you can relive the experience
in a positive way or at least reinterpret them,
your everyday relationships will improve.
The purpose of a female companion
is to look sexy and not be as clever as the Doctor.
The purpose of a male companion is Just to be not as clever as the Doctor.
So you get a stream of imbeciles or inadequates
or completely naive idiots like Adric
or nervous, weedy guys like Turlough.
I think ultimately men are competitors and rivals to the Doctor.
DARVILL: I think it's a really complicated relationship
between the Doctor and Rory.
At times they're the closest of friends,
as much as you can be with a Time Lord.
And then at other times, I think Rory started really standing up for himself
and the more the Doctor puts...
Well, the more he puts Amy in danger, I don't think Rory considers
his own life too much, even though he's died many times.
Jamie and the Doctor, there is a bit of a Men Behaving Badly relationship.
He starts off being Jamie McCrimmon
and about four stories in, he's Frazer Hines.
Because basically, he's getting all the Doctor's anachronistic Jokes.
The Joke in The Tomb of the Cybermen
about having a complete metal breakdown and Jamie winces.
-Ooh. -I'm so sorry.
But he's basically a bloke in a kilt. He could be from the Bay City Rollers
for all the historical texture of him.
-Don't forget me. -Oh, Sarah!
Don't you forget me.
If you have a personality that seeks adventure and excitement and you get it,
the return to the real world is dreadful.
You know, travel does broaden the mind.
Donna's I think is the most tragic ending of a companion
ever in the series. I Just think it's so harsh.
It's more profound when a companion leaves
because it actually changes the nature of the show.
If you look at Season 1 8, you start the series
with an intelligent Doctor with a brainy companion and a robot dog
and you end it with a Doctor with three young children on board the ship,
the character of the show has completely changed.
Not every companion gets written out as sensitively as Rose
or as dramatically as Peri.
Sometimes companions Just have to go feebly into that good night, like Dodo.
She said she's feeling much better and she'd like to stay here in London
-and she sends you her love. -Her love?
And Tegan's departure is probably the most realistic of them all.
It's stopped being fun, Doctor.
Typically, bad experiences, things that are shocking or intense,
can obviously have draining emotional effects.
The extreme case would be post-traumatic stress disorder
or reincidence of panic attack or anxiety.
No!
''Everyone around me is dead, I want to go home.''
And that's a very natural reaction.
I think if I travelled in the Tardis and I had about three stories like that,
I'd be going, ''Goodbye, Doctor, I think I know the way from here.''
Frontios does lead directly to Resurrection of the Daleks.
Tractators in the morning and Daleks in the early afternoon.
That's a big day for anyone.
Tegan, who leaves because it stops being fun and it's very odd,
'cause you think, ''Well, you've never had fun, Tegan.''
I suppose we're stuck here now while she sleeps.
People who don't really enJoy the experience that much
and who can't finalise the Journeys
and need to quit beforehand were obviously not ready for it.
I'd been in the studio when Janet had done her goodbye
and I didn't want to replicate that.
So I Just said, ''It Just needs to be dramatic.
''And as dramatic as you dare to make it. I would love to play that.''
A mind transplant, losing Peri altogether,
is about as dramatic as you could get.
However...
it was then reJigged later on
with this horrible misty photo
of myself and Yrcanos, you know, and I didn't like that at all.
I had no idea I was going to end up married to Brian Blessed.
I think most of them have happy endings, Ian and Barbara,
you know, lots of them leave and get married.
And I think a lot of them leave better people.
They're released from this terror and pain, being attacked by monsters
and turned into monsters and we go, ''Oh no! Stay!
''Be more terrified. Be more scared.''
Do you want to come with me?
I'd probably travel with the Doctor for one adventure
and then go, ''Holy what?''
Would I personally?
I think when I was 1 9, yes, I would.
We would all want to be there at some point so I would definitely try it once.
Well, I'm 34 now and I still sometimes lie in bed
and will close my eyes and really hope that I'll hear the sound of the Tardis
and I would be straight in there.
Yeah, if the Doctor turned up and asked me to go with him,
yeah, I think I would.
Because you'd always be going, ''What if?''
As long as you don't die.