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Lalla Ward - The lovely Lady Romana

Best books
  Bearing in mind that Shada is about a rather odd book, what's the oddest book you've ever read?

Oh my god, the Bible. It depends what you mean. Define odd?

Unusual, unexpected, quirky.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time. You read this unexpected use of sentences which I love, rather than the actual topic.

You're a renowned illustrator of books, tell us a little about that.

I wouldn't say renowned. I don't do that much of it.

I have illustrated two for Richard, [and] I did quite a lot for a vet called Bruce Fogal at one time. I draw animals, so I'm useful to my biologist husband because I can chuck out a few illustrations for slides for lectures, and things like that.

Losing Douglas
  What are your memories of Douglas Adams?

I can't bear it that Douglas isn't still here.

The loss, not just to science fiction or the world of literature or anything like that, but undoubtedly to the world of science as well, is just unquantifiable. It is so depressing. You can't say of all that many people, that the world is deprived when they leave it, and when they leave it so ludicrously young one just feels furious, it's fate's rotten trick to do things like that.

I think Douglas was a real one-off. He was so clever and so intelligent and so well read in real science that he could make science fiction work as well as it did. And just such fun to have around, he was just such a lovely man.

Douglas introduced me to my husband, at his fortieth birthday party, so I have that to thank him for. I really got to know him better after that in a way than I had before, although I'd known him for a very long time and Richard knew him because they both shared a passion for Apple computers. As did I, which is probably why I got on as well as I did with Richard.

So we saw a lot of him and it was dreadful when he died, absolutely dreadful. I can't forget Richard coming up on a Sunday morning rather early, when I hadn't got up saying, 'Something awful has happened.' He said 'Well someone has died,' and I said 'Well tell me, what? Who?' and he said 'Douglas Adams,' and I just thought he was joking.

He'd had an email that morning, very very early, from a mutual friend in Germany. It takes a long time for that sort of thing to sink in, especially when it's somebody so young. You just think 'God, lousy rotten miserable business'. I think the only thing that might conceivably have made Douglas laugh was the thought that some of us now have an excuse never to set foot in a b****y gym ever again, because that's where he died.

Humour in Who
  One of the hallmarks of Doctor Who at the time that Shada was really begun was the fun and the humour of Douglas's input...

It's a very Douglas script.

Are you trying to re-inject some of that sort of type of humour into this production or is it a different horse for a different course?

Well, it's different in that it's audio and not visual, so some of the visual gags go but you don't have to inject anything with Douglas's scripts. That's what's so lovely, you can just get up there and open your mouth and it works. He had a very specific sense of humour - all those undergraduate jokes and things are terribly Douglas.

It's actually lovely to be doing it again, it reminds one of doing [it the first time], because we did in fact record an awful lot of it. We did all that filming down the Cam on a punt, Tom and me, and so I have quite a vivid memory of it all actually, which is a help I think. I'm jolly lucky, I can stand there and remember going through books in Professor Cronotis's room and climbing up ladders and chucking them down for the Doctor to catch. I remember it pretty well actually.

Tom-foolery
  Was being in a punt with Tom in charge of it a scary experience?

No more than being anywhere with Tom in charge of anything.

I suppose it was harder to escape than some situations but it was quite funny because there were these ducks, as there are on the Cam, and they had perfect comic timing. Every time he said anything they'd go 'Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack.'

I think they cut quite a lot of those hilarious bits of laughter from the ducks out but I loved them, and I couldn't wait for them to keep going.

Eclectic taste
  How would you like Romana to appear in the animation for this story?

I thought that one of the great things about Doctor Who was that you were jumping about in time, and I saw her as the kind of person who would drop into whatever the planet's local Portobello Road or whatever was and pick up bits and bobs, which is why I always had them mixing up things like an Edwardian waistcoat with a Victorian jacket. I like that totally mixed up kind of eclectic group of personal props and bits of costume and I think the fun of doing that is where I was very lucky with Doctor Who.

Poor Janet Fielding who came after me paid the price because she ended up in the same costume [for ages]. I think they had done the budget on mine, so she ended up in this wretched uniform for her whole time, and resented me dreadfully for this fact that she was lumbered with her horrible air hostesses gear.

Fashion failures
  Did you like the outfits you wore as Romana?

I absolutely loathed the one in the Creature From The Pit which was no fault of our wonderful designer. We actually shot that first - we didn't do Destiny Of The Daleks first which was my first story, we sort of jumped in the middle for some reason - and because I hadn't worked out what I wanted to do it was a Mary Tamm [style] costume.

Mary looked gorgeous in that sort of thing and I looked like hell on wheels, and I felt completely miserable, I just didn't know what I was doing. Fortunately everybody was worrying far more about that blob who played the monster so I don't think anybody was looking at me.

I got over it but then after that I started thinking about what I wanted to do and what the character really was and got it right. It was just totally not me.

A girl's best friend
  Is the maxim true, never work with children and robotic dogs?

No, the maxim is not true, robotic dogs are definitely the thing to work with, K9, aren't you. Probably better than real dogs I dare say.

There's an awful lot of, 'Come on, K9,' you know, because he couldn't go over things and he was so slow. As for children, I don't really know about that, I haven't really worked with children so... I like children.

Remaining Romana
  You've played Romana the High President a few times for Big Finish now. Are you happy with the promotion and the development of the character?

I don't know that the character develops. I enjoy playing it, it's fun, and I love doing audio stuff because normally I don't have to be on cameras like this. [That] makes it much tougher, and you have to fuss about things like what you're wearing and whether you look as if you're gone through a hedge backwards.

So I love audio things. It's fun because you work with different people. One of the things that's good about doing Shada is that it's Paul McGann and it's just very different. You get a different take on the Doctor's character which inevitably makes you react differently.

It's strange because the kind of banter that Tom and I had going isn't the same, but then it keeps you on your toes which is a very good thing. You're not thinking, 'Oh god, how did I do it last time?' you can just reinvent it with another person, which is a nice thing to do.

Joining Who
  What was your earliest memory of Doctor Who?

Getting the part. Well, actually no, because I never really did get the part, I originally joined it as a different character, if you remember. You're probably one of these Who buffs who knows far more about it than I ever did at the time.

The interviewer is patted on the head by the cameraman at this stage.

So I never really got the part, I played Princess whatever her name was, Astra, per ardua ad astra ["through struggle to the stars" - the motto of the Canadian air force]. I wanted her to be called Ardua, never mind. Mary wasn't sure whether she was going to do it or not, and I sort of drifted into it I think because Tom got on well with me and it was easy. So in a way, there weren't really early memories, it just happened.

As for watching it, I never really did as a child because we didn't watch all that much television so I pretended I did at the interview. I said, 'Oh yes, I hid behind the sofa like everybody else,' you know.

Don't ask me who my favourite monster was because I'm sick of saying Tom Baker.

Shakespeare and sci fi
  Tell us about performing in the 1980 BBC Shakespeare Hamlet production.

I think I got it because I was so sure I wouldn't that I was really extremely relaxed about it. I know an awful lot of people were up for the part, and it was a frightfully prestigious thing to get. We did it in a break between my two series of Doctor Who so I went along for the audition and thought, 'You must be joking, they're never going to give this to the Doctor Who girl.'

I think it was because Cedric Messina, the producer, had probably never even heard of Doctor Who, certainly never watched it that I got away with it. Perhaps because I was relaxed I did a good job at the interview for not being petrified out of my skin, so I got it.

Then I went to the read-through. I'd been watching on telly a series that they did on Sunday evenings of Shakespearean actors showing you how to perform, how to read sonnets, and one of them was Patrick Stewart, who played Claudius in that Hamlet. I was terrified of him because he was so good in this programme.

Claire Bloom who played Gertrude wasn't there because she was still doing Brideshead, which went on interminably because of strikes - probably the same strike that clobbered Shada got her - so she wasn't there. There are only two women in Hamlet, Gertrude and Ophelia so mine in a four hour read-through was the only female voice to be heard, since our script editor decided to read in Gertrude. He did a jolly good job actually.

Every time I opened my mouth I sounded like a little mouse. It was so scary and awful and I'd learnt the songs, which are frightening to do, two days before, so I kept thinking 'Oh my god, what am I going to do? This scene's going to turn up and I'm going to have to do these songs and oh god help.'

At the beginning somebody, I suppose the director, had said 'I'm sure every one of you has played parts in Hamlet in the past,' and Eric Porter, who was playing Polonius said, 'Well, as a matter of fact I've never been in Hamlet.' I thought, 'Oh goody, someone else who's never done this sort of stuff.' [Then] he said 'I've been in 30 of the 32 plays, of course, but funnily enough never Hamlet.'

I thought, 'Well there goes my ally in this thing. And then after the read-through I went down in the lift with Patrick, and he said 'Gosh, that was a marathon, wasn't it,' and I said 'Yes,' and he said 'Of course the highlight was the songs, that was wonderful.' I thought, 'Oh, thank you that was all right then.'

Patrick said to me, 'You used to be in Doctor Who didn't you?' and I said 'Yes, I still am actually,' and he said 'I mean why do you do all this television, why don't you do proper stuff like theatre,' and I said 'Well I love it actually, I love doing Doctor Who.' 'But science fiction, I mean why would you want to do science fiction?' I said, 'I don't know - I think partly because you learn so much technical stuff, it's really interesting,' and he said 'Oh I wouldn't want to do that sort of stuff.'

I haven't run into Patrick Stewart since, but I look forward to it so I can say, 'Funny, why do you do all that sort of science fiction stuff you do now, why aren't you doing the proper theatre like real actors.'