livii shares my insane fascination and writes about it at length here. There's not a lot of us about who appreciate her.

In my pieces on Dodo Chaplet posted in April I followed WikiPedia (which I have now changed) and general fannish lore in stating that Jackie Lane was only 18 when she played the part in early 1966, having been born in 1947. In fact, the Reeltime interview with her taped in 1993 states that her date of birth was 10 July 1941, which makes her 24 at the time of filming, a year younger than Carole Ann Ford and two years older than Maureen O'Brien. This fits much better with other evidence, such as her having been offered the original part of Susan in 1963 and having started acting with Manchester Library Theater in 1960, after failing to get the role played by Rita Tushingham (born 1940) in A Taste of Honey.

I wonder how the later date crept into the received wisdom of fandom? Given that she already had five years of acting behind her, it is unlikely to have been Lane's fault; she would have no reason to pretend that she had started acting professionally at the age of thirteen. Presumably someone early on in fannish history simply mis-copied the date from some publicity material.

What to say about Dodo Chaplet? ( Actually, rather a lot. )

4) Doctor Who - The Massacre, by John Lucarotti
5) Doctor Who - The Ark, by Paul Erickson
6) Doctor Who - The Celestial Toymaker, by Gerry Davis and Alison Bingeman
7) Doctor Who - The Gunfighters, by Donald Cotton
8) Doctor Who - The Savages, by Ian Stuart Black
9) Doctor Who - The War Machines, by Ian Stuart Black

Feeding my unhealthy fascination with the First Doctor's companion Dodo, I borrowed wwhyte's copies of the Target novelisations of her stories and found them pretty easy to get through. They are all between 120 and 150 pages long, and not particularly taxing. I read them in sequence, but in fact there is little real sense of continuity between them; fans will find more to tickle their obsessions in the four spinoff novels featuring Dodo, whose collective pagecount certainly exceeds that of the six discussed here.

( Doctor Who-The Massacre )
( Doctor Who-The Ark )
( Doctor Who-The Celestial Toymaker )
( Doctor Who-The Gunfighters )
( Doctor Who-The Savages )
( Doctor Who-The War Machines )

In conclusion, I found these books a pretty easy read when feeling generally somewhat run down. They do feed into my thoughts on Dodo as a character, but I will save that for another day.

Right, that's it decided: I very much prefer the audios with linking narration to the fan reconstructions of "lost" Doctor Who episodes. Especially (though not only) if Peter Purves is doing them. The Savages is a real little gem of a story, even if it does have one of the most amusing lines in the whole of Doctor Who. The incidental music is particularly impressive (which of course makes more of a difference for a story that's on audio only); it is by Raymond Jones, who also wrote the music for The Romans, and very little else (Wodehouse Playhouse, according to imdb).

The story itself is a clean and simple classic Who plot: the Doctor arrives in an apparent paradise, discovers the evil going on behind the scenes, and fixes it. No aliens, no monsters apart from the human beings and their misuse of their own powers, and indeed nobody dies; several important ethical themes are addressed (as explored by Fiona Moore in one of her excellent essays); and we have the first case of someone other than Hartnell playing the Doctor, or at least part of him, for the first time. Steven gets a decent farewell scene, rather unlike Dodo who lasted only two episodes into the next story.

Anyway, the audio CDs are strongly recommended.