“When David Tennant agreed to appear in ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ I’m sure he didn’t expect it to be the last thing his Doctor ever did. The poor guy had already endured his regeneration, seen Matt Smith and Steven Moffat take over, basically had run himself physically and emotionally ragged for ‘The End of Time’ - and now he had to do it all again! He must have been completely Who’d out by the time he arrived with us but you never would have guessed it. And it’s fitting, I suppose, that his last appearance as the Doctor is to save his former companion one more time. The kids- I must stop calling them that - were obviously bowled over by the whole thing. Tommy and I had been in ‘Journey’s End’ and ‘The Stolen Earth’ already, but having the TARDIS with us and the actual Doctor gave the whole episode the sort of boost money can’t buy. The energy of the man is utterly incredible - he’s like an electrical storm arriving on set. Things just happen. Even K-9 behaved for him ! The only thing about the episode that frustrates me is the ending. Sarah says, ‘Until we meet again’. ‘Don’t forget me Sarah Jane, ‘ David’s Doctor replies. Loads of people wrote to congratulate me on that - ‘Oh, Lis, that was a stroke of genius !’ - and I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. And then the penny dropped. It was a beautiful homage to my original farewell from ‘The Hand of Fear; and I hadn’t even spotted it. The whole point of that scene had gone completely over my head ! Gareth Roberts, who wrote the episode, is so clever - and I’m so stupid. I bet David knew - he is a proper fan. Me ? Not a clue, I’m afraid - I didn’t tie it in to Tom’s words to me at all. If I had realised, I would have played it very differently. There’s obviously a lot of emotional baggage you can unpack with those words. All the things I could have done .... But no, it completely passed me by until the plaudits started to come in. Still, at least I wasn’t hiding a broken leg this time. ‘School Reunion’ had been very much me entering the Doctor’s world. Now he was coming into mine. At least, that’s how it should have been. But as soon as the team knew that David was definitely doing it, the number of pages with his name on just seemed to go up and up. His heart must have sunk when he saw the amount of work in store for him. So he might have been forgiven if he’d served up some sort of Doctor-lite. But you never get that with David - it was a majestic performance, so alive and rat-a-tat-tat, and I’m so proud to know it was his last performance as the Tenth Doctor. [Note: At the time of Lis’ death, this was true. Though now we have the appearance with Matt Smith in ‘The Day of the Doctor’. The reference to the broken leg is a hip injury from a severe fall Lis took in a running scene with David in ‘School Reunion’ ] - Elisabeth Sladen the autobiography pp. 323-324
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 10:23:28 +0000
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