Patrick Troughton (1986)

Here’s a transcript from Patrick Troughton’s appearance at one of the Panopticon conventions. It’s quite a wide-ranging interview, covering his initial acceptance of the role through to his decision to quit after three years.

“The telephone rang. I was in Ireland doing a film called ‘The Viking Queen’, in which I did not play the main part, and I forget who, I think it was Shaun Sutton, Shaun Sutton was at the other end of the phone with this astonishing and preposterous suggestion. It was a fairly quick way of making it die a death, I thought. As each day passed, he kept on asking and offering me more pennies for it. I had a young family, I thought ‘I could get them educated on this’, and after about a week I thought ‘Right, now I can educate the kids, I’ll do the part’. So that’s really why I took it.

“We went to Berman’s, I think it was Berman’s, and we looked through all the old rubbish, really. (laughs) We just got things out of hampers and had a look. It was sort of a ragged imitation of Billy Hartnell, I suppose, only way out. And there was a first script, which was sort of written for Billy but which was written, it struck me, for a very verbose, sort of autocratic Sherlock Holmes who never stopped talking. And I thought ‘That won’t do for me over three years of every Saturday’, so I said first of all ‘No, I don’t see the part like this, I see it really as a listener’. I think this Doctor listens to everyone, tots it all up and then makes his own decision about this.

“Then in comes Sydney Newman, and he starts talking about this cosmic hobo, who obviously doesn’t talk like an intellectual type, autocratic Sherlock Holmes at all. And I leapt at it, what a good idea, and I said ‘A man like that would be more of a listener, wouldn’t he?’, and they said ‘Yes’. So that’s how that came about, really. I was very keen on doing it like that, because to begin with I found myself playing it over the top, mostly because that’s how Sydney Newman was urging me to play it. But Shaun Sutton, who I think was a little wiser than Sydney Newman in many ways, in fact considerably wiser, he said ‘No, no, just do it in your head, old chap’, so I toned it down a bit after that and it was warmer and a bit more successful.

“And of course Michael Craze was responsible for me wearing that absurd Beatles cut, he and Anneke Wills. Just before we went on, we got down to make-up and I’d had a lovely wig fitted that made me look just like Tom Baker, actually, or Colin, and I put it on, and they (Anneke Wills and Michael Craze) both looked at me and said ‘You look like Harpo Marx and we’re not going on with you in that wig’, I said ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, they said ‘No, sorry, no’. So they took if off and started doing things, combing it and lifting it and all that, and I ended up like the Beatles, which is totally out of date. Not that that matters to a Timelord.

“When you’re a character actor you’re having to make decisions all the time, and that’s a question of gaining confidence in the part you play, and that takes the time, really. Whereas with ‘Doctor Who’, the three years of it, you weren’t learning lines, really, you were learning thoughts.

“I was delighted when (Frazer Hines) joined. I knew him way back, because Frazer… (thinks) He’s a good listener, when you’re together just with him, he’s a good listener. And he’s not a bad actor, either! (laughs) We never played practical jokes, never. I’ve never known it to happen. (laughs) There’s no time for all that. All we did in rehearsals was to play Aggravation for three years. That’s a card game. We had penny stakes on it, and we played solidly when we weren’t actually on the set. It kept your mind sane, really. You had to keep to a routine, ’cause when you’re working at that pitch you have to keep to a routine, rather like a very young child or a very old man like I’m getting. And if that routine is broken, you just want to break into tears. There was a director once who bounded in and said ‘We’re going to start rehearsals at ten instead of ten-fifteen’, and that completely ruined our life for about half an hour. (laughs) It’s an astonishing thing, you’d keep going as long as everything was just like the day before, but once it got different… it was very worrying.

“Starting again was rather like jumping on a running bus. I remember that Monday, Tuesday… Monday we read it, Tuesday rehearsed it, Wednesday rehearsed it, half day Thursday then you were on Friday. We filmed every fortnight, and in the end, Frazer and Wendy and I had a sit-down strike and said ‘We’re not going to film at the weekends, because we’re getting tired irritable’. We had a big conference, Shaun Sutton took us out for a lovely meal, tried to talk us out of it, and we said ‘No!’, and in the end the planners, those chaps up in the sixth floor with their little maps and flags all arrange in lovely patterns but who don’t know much about the actual working of a play, they changed their mind.

“You could stay with it, and they wanted me to, for as long as the BBC did it or they got tired of you. That might be at best, one thought, five years. That would have been eight years, and by then one would have been so connected with the character that getting other work would have been very difficult indeed. So that was the main consideration there. Or one could leave. Give up a fortune. And that’s what we decided to do”.

Wendy Padbury (1992)

There’ll be a longer Wendy Padbury interview in a few days, but until then here she is talking about getting the role of Zoe, her fondness for Patrick Troughton and, of course, her memories of practical jokes on the ‘Doctor Who’ set.

“I was sent by my agent as a horribly out of work young actress to interview for the part of Zoe, along with probably the rest of London, all those of us who were sort of five foot nothing and young, which led then to a recall and another recall and another recall until they whittled us down to about six of us, and we were sent a script of just a page of dialogue which had just one small speech. Every single emotion that you could possibly imagine. And each girl had to learn this piece, and we went to the studio and recorded it, and the camera was just on our eyes and I can remember we had to stand on a spot and we couldn’t move, and it was all on the eyes, good job it wasn’t on the knees because my knees were knocking. And they chose me!

“I didn’t personally have any reservations whatsoever, for the simple reason that Pat Troughton was and always has been my very favourite actors, especially as a child. I used to watch him in all those Sunday afternoon dramas, and the thought of working with Pat was brill. And then the character itself was such fun, from what I’d seen of ‘Doctor Who’ before I went into it the girls tended to scream a lot and Zoe wasn’t quite like that to begin with. She was this very clever astrophysicist, she just wasn’t a screamer, she was able, especially in later episodes, to say to the Doctor ‘Leave this to me, I can sort this out’. She did do a fair amount of screaming, but she was great to play. I think in ‘The Wheel in Space’, my first story, Eric Flynn called Zoe ‘all brain and no heart’, which I thought was great!

“One of the most embarrassing moments actually happened during rehearsals of one of the Cyberman stories, I think I’d had a late night and I came into the rehearsal room not looking my best. Pat, Frazer and I were sat down learning our lines for a scene, and I was wearing a kilt, quite a short kilt, and Pat and Frazer sat either side of me. I have to say here that we were rehearsing in a church hall, which is quite relevant to the story. So we sat down, and because I’d had a late night I sort of nodded off, and suddenly I got two elbows in my ribs, with Pat and Frazer either side of me, saying ‘Quick, quick, you’re on!’, and I shot out of my chair and they’d undone the kilt, so I shot into the rehearsal room in my knickers. I was so embarrassed, I ran out of the doors and bumped into the vicar. I curtsied and ran into the ladies toilets.

“I remember the end of ‘The Wheel in Space’ really well, because it was when I went off to join Patrick and Frazer in their adventures. And Patrick was trying to put me off, really, he put that thing on his head where the thought processes came out and onto a screen, and he said ‘I’m not sure you’ll want to come with us, Zoe, have you ever heard of the Daleks?’. I think having met the Cybermen, she’d have loved to have gone anywhere after that, to meet anything.

Morris Barry (1992)

Here’s Morris Barry talking about his experiences directing ‘The Moonbase’ and ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’.

“Well the chief problem was that I’d never done a ‘Doctor Who’ before. Of course I’d seen them, I’d watched them with my young children and they kept on saying ‘Well you’re in the BBC, you ought to be able to tell us, how do they do this, dad?’, and I didn’t know, because all the things I’d been directing for eight or nine years, they were all cosy little plays or serials, a bit of soap, that sort of thing. So it was a challenge for me, anyway. Amazingly, when I found all the back-up that I had, with design and special effects, all that, if you didn’t know how to do something, they came along and said ‘How about trying this?’, so that was very nice. But it did tax one, I found. I had to pull out all the stops.

“The Cyber costumes were redesigned, but I can’t honestly remember why, exactly. I of course think that my Cyber costumes were better than anyone else’s Cyber costumes, they had bits and pieces on, piping down the sides of their arms etc., but I don’t know why they kept on changing them. There was one thing that was a purely personal thing, I’m not very good with heights but I did want to get a long shot of the TARDIS, and we had three sizes of TARDIS, the full size one, a middle one and one about 2ft high, and so of course if you use the 2ft high one on a set, a sort of blank set, and you got up to the lighting gantry at Ealing and you shot down from there, that was fine, that was excellent. But of course you can’t really ask a cameraman to go up there and shoot without you going up as well, and I was petrified, absolutely petrified going up that ladder and finding all the stage crew, the lighting hands and so on, sitting there smoking themselves silly, eating their sandwiches etc., and I was terrified.

“When I did ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’, I felt that it was a bit better than the last one I did, and that I was a bit better, mind you I’d have the experience of doing the previous one, and ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’ was remarkable, I think. One of the scenes was when all the Cybermen came to life, or rather came out of their sleep and came out of their, well they looked like egg boxes, which was their, well their tombs of course. When I walked into the studio and saw what the designers had done for me, I was amazed, because this great big egg box thing went up. Part of it, the bottom part I think, was used at Ealing film studios first of all, and here again Visual Effects managed to film backwards, in other words reverse the camera. I think I’m right in saying they put fake snow on this cellophane thing that covered the Cybermen, and then gradually took it away. I may have got it the wrong way round, but you know what I mean, and it looks marvellous when it was shown, and this was cut into the studio stuff that I was shooting later on where you saw all these rows and rows of Cybermen coming to life very slowly, and eventually the Cybermen down below putting their hands through the cellophane and climbing out very slowly. It was I think, from my memory, quite remarkable. I remember that in the middle of it, we had a tea break, the PA said ‘Right, tea break everyone’ and we all walked off the set, and the extra Cybermen up on the top shelf of the egg box couldn’t get down, because they had to have a ladder to get down, and unfortunately they had to go without their tea. But all along, I felt that there was something about it that would be appreciated”.

Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison (1983)

This is one of the best multi-Doctor interviews around. To mark the show’s twentieth anniversary, three of the four surviving Doctors got together on the BBC’s ‘Nationwide’ show. It’s defintely worth watching the clip, because part of the joy is the interaction between them, especially Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee.

Q: Jon, the Doctor always gets away with it. Is that some deep philosophical message, the triumph of good over evil, or is it ingenious fun?

JP: It’s his brilliance! It’s his brilliance and his experience, is it not Patrick?

PT: Oh yes! What are we talking about? Yes! Brilliant, yes!

Q: We must ask him a question because he’s been waiting. Patrick, the character as you saw it, would you like to tell me about that?

PT: Yes. Well it took me time to see the character because I had to follow Billy, and that was the first follow. And it was a question of doing it differently, really, because you couldn’t do it the same. So we had various ideas, first a kind of captain with one of those Victorian… (mimes a hat)

Q: It was the late 60’s when you did it, wasn’t it? I thought that was a Dr. Who of its time, because you had a kind of Beatles haircut, didn’t you?

PT: It probably was, yes. There was a thing about that, actually, because Mike Craze and Anneke, when they saw my wig in make-up –

JP: What wig?

PT: I had a wig, originally, in make-up, they saw it, they said ‘No, we are not going on’, I looked like Harpo Marx.

JP: That’s where Tom got the idea.

PT: So they whipped it off and they dressed my hair like a Beatle.

Q: Peter, it’s now unashamedly for adults, isn’t it, because they’ve put you on later.

PD: Well I don’t think it’s unashemedly for adults, I think it’s always had a fairly adult audience, and I think they tried to give it an extra boost by putting it on in the week, and it’s certainly increased the viewing figures.

Q: Jon, do children still stop you in the street? Do they still think you’re Dr. Who?

JP: Yes, when they don’t think I’m Worzel Gummidge.

PT: Have you seen his Worzel Gummidge? Fantastic.

Q: But do they believe that you’re some sort of supernatural being?

JP: Yes. They say ‘Hello Doc, I wonder if you could help me out with a little bit of trouble’.

PD: But it’s quite extraordinary, because the day after it was announced that I would be Dr. Who, I was called Dr. Who in the street.

Q: They stopped calling you Tristram?

PD: Yes, they did, that ended it. But before I’d even appeared, you know, people were so used to the idea, they even thought they’d seen me, they said ‘I watch you every week’, they were watching Tom!

Q: But it has to be frightening, doesn’t it? (to Patrick) I mean you’re sending it up –

PT: I don’t! I’ve never sent it up in my life! It’s a different attitude to a desperately dangerous situation.

PD: When you’re doing it, you can’t send it up. When you’re in rehearsal, you can’t afford to send it up.

PT: We might do it here.

Q: Have any of you any regrets about doing it? Has it ruined your lives?

ALL: No!

JP: Good heavens, no.

PT: Absolutely not.

JP: The repeats are marvellous.

Q: Listen, it’s been worked out that the Time Lord, he can regenerate himself thirteen times –

PT: Hey?

Q: It’s very mathematical. Listen, 45 years more he’s got to live. What I want to know is, when is a woman going to be Dr. Who?

PD: That depends on when I give up, don’t you think?

PT: What a good idea.

Anneke Wills (2007)

This is a transcript of parts of Anneke Wills’ interview with Mark Ayres on the audio version of ‘The War Machines’. Her autobiography, ‘Self Portrait’, which she discusses, was published in 2007 and is definitely worth reading for the insight into 60’s London.

Q:  Can you tell us a little bit about what you were doing before you joined ‘Doctor Who’?

A: 1966 was actually an amazing year for me because I had done a tremendous amount of telly. Plays of the week were the great bits of drama and I had done three that year, cracking parts, and I had done ‘The Saint’ and ‘The Avengers’ and ‘The Likely Lads’, so I’d been very busy that year and then I got the part in ‘Doctor Who’, so 1966 was definitely the year of Anneke.

Q: And how did the ‘Doctor Who’ part come up?

A: Erm… went along for the audition, knowing that it was for a part in ‘Doctor Who’, but not knowing that it was to play the companion. I didn’t know that. And then when they got back to my agent, they said ‘Okay and this is for a regular part’, so then I was over the moon, you can imagine.

Q: Was there any doubt about going into a long-running show like ‘Doctor Who’?

A: Never, because you needed the work, you know? As an actor, the bottom line is you always need the work. So you say Yes and figure it out later.

Q: And your character was going to be a bit of a departure from the assistants that had gone before you?

A: Yes, I think it was absolutely their conscious decision to have a sort of 60’s chick and I came ready with my own clothes.

Q: And most of the previous girl assistants had been granddaughter type figures to the Doctor, apart from Barbara who was a teacher, and you came in as a kind of sassy character who’d give him a bit of lip back.

A: And with very short skirts. And very long eyelashes batting away. So that was a conscious decision of theirs to say ‘Alright, we want to move the companion into being more of a sexy kid’. Yeah.

Q: Setting a trend for years ahead.

A: Setting a trend, so actually I was the first in a very long line of very lovely women, I have to say! (laughs)

Q: You came into ‘Doctor Who’ from a background of film shows like ‘The Avengers’. Was it very noticeable that ‘Doctor Who’ was of a much lower budget?

A: Well of course the format was totally different because ‘The Saint’ and ‘The Avengers’ were filmed, so you were doing that at Elstree, and ‘Doctor Who’ was this tight little live performance that you did on a Saturday, and you had to rattle through not making too many mistakes and get to the end, so it felt very much like theatre, in a way, like a live performance that you do all in one go, so it’s much more frightening. Yes, the money was tight, but the money was always tight. Everything I’d ever done for the BBC, the money was tight. I did ‘The Railway Children’ and this was an eight-week, big BBC children’s drama and it had a lot of people taking note of it, and I had a costume that didn’t fit, so I had these nasty scratchy cuffy things that didn’t fit! They couldn’t afford… this came from Berman’s and it didn’t fit me! You can’t imagine that happening nowadays. And that wasn’t the case with ‘The Saint’ and ‘The Avengers’, you know, this was proper filming and you had a proper make-up and wardrobe department that had money to spend. They bought me nice shoes and bags and things.

Q: Tell us a bit about the production team of the time, Innes Lloyd etc. How hands on were they, did you see much of them?

A: I tell you, Innes Lloyd never laid his hands on me! He never did! But as actors, of course, we were second-class citizens, really, we weren’t told anything, we weren’t asked anything, we just turned up and did our rehearsing and our acting. Even when we switched Doctors, we were the last to be told. I was aware of Bill Hartnell’s irascibility, because my hubby had played the Toymaker before and so I already knew that he was liable to go off on one, so you had to watch him. So there was that element in rehearsals of having to be careful of the old man and having to treat him gently, so that was a little tense. Rehearsals were not as fun as they would become later, with Patrick Troughton, I have to say.

Q: There was none of the star system that there is now? It was really just ‘Stand there, say that’?

A: Yes, although as time went by you could start to change lines to make them work for you, because then you were an established character, and you could say ‘Polly would say it like this’, and they’d allow a little bit of that. But there was no time for discussion, because you had to get this show on the road in a week.

Q: Now, there are edicts saying you can’t say ‘Death’ and ‘Killing’ in shows aimed at children, but ‘The Smugglers’ had some very dark moments. Did that ever occur to you back then?

A: The attitude was very different. I don’t think we discussed it. Amazing, really, how without awareness we were, in a way. One of the things I do remember, because this was a new thing for me, was that passers-by would see that we were filming ‘Doctor Who’ and there was immediately this feeling of bon homie… but this was new for me, working in the exteriors.

Q: What was Michael Craze like to work with?

A: He was a pal. He was a chum, and he was a pal. He was a pal forever, and we got on very well and we were a team, the two of us. I think in the beginning we supported each other, because working with Bill was tricky so we supported each other.

Q: What about your personal support staff, like Sonja Markham on make-up and Daphne Dare on costumes?

A: Sonja Markham is actually Roger Lloyd-Pack’s sister-in-law, I’ve known her ever since. Daphne Dare was wardrobe. As I said before, I came ready-made, you see, because the BBC wardrobes did not have the kind of costumers which I was already wearing. My normal clothes were Mary Quant, Ozzie Clark, so I was very determined that I would wear my own clothes.

Q: It amazes me how much of yourself you brought to Polly.

A: I think that if you’re given the chance, you bring it as close as you can to yourself because that makes it real. It’s no good me trying to be someone other than who I am, you know, so when nobody’s looking… in the beginning, Polly is supposed to be a debutante, and without saying anything to Innes I thought this was a bit of a cliche, Ben is the cockney and Polly is the posh bird, and they make a friendship, and actually if you notice over the months that we were working together that was kind of toned down. And you want to make it as real and interesting and fun as possible, and in a way when nobody’s got any time for you… you know, they’re busy trying to figure out how the War Machines are going to work, or how the Cybermen are going to die and so forth… you have to get on with making your part of the script as real as possible.

Q: When you started, how long did you think you might stay with it?

A: Do you know, I have a feeling that we did the first four, and we weren’t even sure, because we weren’t sure about Billy, you see, because he wasn’t well. So everything was up for grabs, we didn’t know that we would be continuing, we certainly didn’t know, you know, that we would go on with a new Doctor. That was unheard of, that was un-thought of. So we didn’t know, we were just floating along hoping that things would go, because we need the money, as an actor. It was a job!

And the other thing is that it was just a job, it wasn’t a big deal like it is now with Billie Piper and the press. It was just a job. It was fun to be in ‘The Avengers’, it was fun to be in ‘The Saint’, it was fun to be in ‘Doctor Who’, but then of course it’s a complete mystery and a magic thing that I’m sitting here with you, today, 43, 44 years later still being involved with it. A complete miracle.

Q: One you’re pleased about?

A: Absolutely. I consider it a total honour to be asked to do these narrations, telling the story again, listening to the little voices. What I hear is how young we sound. We sound so young. But it’s lovely to be involved.

Q: You’ve been revisiting this part of your life quite a lot lately, what with writing your book…

A: Yes, I’m just in the middle of writing my autobiography so there’s a website set up there, because I’m going to do it self-publishing because there’s been quite a lot of rubbish written about me over the years so when I heard the words ‘full control’ I thought ‘Yep’, so it’s going ahead in full fettle at the moment and should be coming out this summer, so watch this space. The first book will go from childhood to the mid-60’s, because it was an extraordinary time to be in the world, to be in London, and so many of the old established rules and laws and ways of being were being thrown out the window.

Q: Were you very aware at the time that you were involved in such an exciting time when things were changing, or did you just live it?

A: You just lived it. In the 60’s, all the wonderful people that you met, Peter Cooke, John Lennon, all these people that you actually met. You didn’t just talk to John Lennon like it’s just someone you met, your heart is pounding when you’re talking to John Lennon, but it was an exciting time to be around and meet these luminaries.

Q: But you were a luminary yourself…

A: I don’t see that. Just a jobbing actor, trying to get work, but I did happen to actually befriend a lot of these very prominent people. Brilliant and talented people. Exciting times.

Patrick Troughton (1973)

This Pebble Mill interview was recorded in 1973 and is perhaps most notable for Patrick Troughton running rings around the interviewer, who at times says things with which Troughton doesn’t entirely agree. This is transcribed from the original video, which you can see here.

Q: What was it like playing Dr. Who for three years. Was it like a sort of second childhood for you?

A: It was very good fun. We had a wonderful time, with some wonderful people, and it was a very jokey part so, um…

Q: In fact you made it a jokey part, didn’t you, because Dr. Who mark 1 was a little bit more serious, he was older and cantankerous whereas you introduced an element of comedy into it.

A: Well, I thought we had to do something a bit different. My original idea was to black up and wear a big turban and brass earrings and a big grey beard and do it like the Arabian Knights. I thought that would be a wonderful idea, but when I’d finished, I could shave off, take the black off, take the turban off and nobody would know who I was and I wouldn’t be typecast. But they didn’t think that was a very good idea.

Q: You haven’t played very many comedies. Why is that?

A: I play comedy all the time.

Q: No, you see I was just wondering, you see you introduced this element of comedy into ‘Doctor Who’ and yet you were known as a serious actor. Does this mean that really underneath this serious face of yours you would like to play more comedy parts?

A: (aghast, with a smile) But ‘Doctor Who’ was a serious part! It wasn’t an unserious part at all, gracious me, Billy had made him this crotchety old gentleman, he was very serious and I had to be very serious too. But the way I made him serious was to make him a bit of a clown to start with, a sort of offbeat thing, but that… we started rather wild, and we mellowed as the time went on.

Q: Was it difficult making the change from Dr. Who back into a normal acting role, because you went into a historical role after that, didn’t you?

A: Yes, it was a bit difficult. When you’re in a part for three years you, well let’s say you get rather in the habit of playing it and into that way of thinking, and I suddenly had to play a very serious Duke of Norfolk and instead of reading up on Norfolk, although I did that, I found myself thinking of all the ways I could be different from Dr. Who, because I only had a week between finishing one and rehearsing the other, so I had to watch that very carefully and it was just a bit difficult.

Q: You played lots of villains’ parts, you played lots of heroes too, in fact am I right in thinking you were the first Robin Hood on television?

A: Yes, yes, that’s right, about the time that Stalin pegged out. It was me and Stalin on the front page.

Q: What was it like, because you had to do it live in those days, didn’t you? You didn’t have such things as recorded plays.

A: Yes, we did that live. In one scene we had back projection which – of course everyone knows what that is – which is a sort of slide that comes in and it was a picture of the forest, you see. And on this occasion we’d got a film crew to do the back projection and I don’t think they quite realised that we were live on television. Anyway we started the scene… Leonard Sachs, I think it was, and myself… and there was a great crashing and banging behind us and we thought what’s going on here…

Q: Rather a strange noise in Sherwood Forest.

A: And there was a sort of shout of ‘Right, it’s your end’, ‘No, it’s your end’, and we turned around and the forest had come in sideways, and all the trees were that way round instead of that way round. And then there was more crashing and banging and the screen went blank, and then all the trees came up right and we had to go on playing.

Q: That was a sort of early science fiction in the middle of Robin Hood, almost.

A: Yes, yes, one could say that.

Q: As I said earlier on, you’ve also played a lot of villainous roles as well. What attracts you to that?

A: Nothing attracts me, I just get cast as them occasionally.

Q: You must enjoy playing them.

A: Oh I’ve always enjoyed playing things, but I just take what part comes along, it’s like a great big lucky dip, it’s lovely. And you know, different people see me as different things and… um…

Q: Do you enjoy playing the real character parts? Perhaps you can get more into a villain?

A: Yeah, as long as they’re well written, super. Marvellous.

Q: You tend to be someone who’s avoided interviews and talking to the press a lot over the years –

A: Who said that?

Q: You did, you told me that earlier on!

A: (smiling) What a lie! I never said anything of the sort. What I said was I always enjoy having interviews with the BBC, which is quite a different thing.

Q: Yes, but you did say that you like to keep the illusion of the character, didn’t you?

A: Did I? Oh yes, keep the illusion of the character, what do you mean?

Q: Well you’re interviewing me now, you explain to me what you meant by that.

A: Well I don’t know whether I said that. Well I think what we mean here is that it’s important to take the part seriously, really, that’s all it boils down to, which means doing your homework on it. The Americans… (pauses, laughs) better not say that really. Ten years or fifteen years ago they called it the Method, what it really means is thinking about what you’re doing at home before you come and do it, really.

Q: And what it means is Patrick Troughton the actor enjoys keeping himself apart from the character that he plays, he’s two separate people. Anyway –

A: I didn’t say that either!

Q: You did!

A: It’s lies, all lies!