For the Doctor Who fan, no events were more saddening last year than the twin losses of Nicholas Courtney and Elisabeth Sladen – the latter’s passing made all the more incomprehensible by those eternally youthful looks, and the sense that this was an actress enjoying more than just an Indian summer: she was in the acme of her career.
Released last November, her posthumous autobiography – co-written with author Jeff Hudson – makes for an intriguing read.
Celebrities pepper its pages: Edwina Cohen (latterly Currie), who Lis vomited over in a school production; Ann Widdecombe, who is revealed as a fan of K9. Lis has an ear for a good anecdote, which she delivers with the poise of one who is too polite to say anything too outrageous, and too guarded to reveal anything too intimate about herself.
It is in the diplomatic absences in the stories, as much as in the anecdotes themselves, that this book reveals Sladen’s high professional standards. Discussion of Jon Pertwee is tempered with implicit criticism of the old BBC’s partisan ways in denying him a star vehicle after his departure from the show, while Sladen repeats an entirely credible rumour that Richard Hurndall died before ever receiving his pay cheque for The Five Doctors.
The best artists brook no nonsense, and Sladen clearly regretted those instances – chief among them the scene in The Five Doctors when Sarah Jane falls down a grassy slope – when she capitulated to the whims of directors against her better professional judgements.
The Lis Sladen that graces this book – such an apt word that, ‘grace’, for Lis – is essentially a rather circumspect woman: immensely loyal and generous when trust had been won, but, by nature and experience, too wary to give too much about her interior life away – even to her husband and daughter who never knew until the end that, every time Lis got in the car to go to BBC Wales in Cardiff, she cried. Every time.
In the book’s Afterword, Brian and Sadie talk, as Lis herself does in the book, about the distinction between Lis Miller and Lis Sladen, and it’s a distinction which comes across strongly in its pages. Those people whom Sladen took to her heart – among them, Russell T Davies, who was the first she told of her cancer diagnosis – can count themselves lucky indeed.
Published on 7th November 2011 by Aurum Press Ltd.