Katy Manning is best known to genre fans as Josephine Grant Jones – assistant to the third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee – a role she has returned to both on screen in The Sarah Jane Adventures with Lis Sladen, and in multiple Big Finish audios. To mark the release of the Blu-ray of her final season, she chatted with Paul Simpson, who grew up watching the show with Pertwee and Manning sparking an interest that led to his career over the last three decades…

It’s inspirational, like the new trailer by Benjamin Cook who watched it as a boy. It’s what puts the love into Doctor Who – virtually everybody who works on it now and in the past has been inspired to do the job that they now do by this incredible TV show. It never ceases to amaze me. It’s the show that keeps on growing and giving to so many. It really has changed so many lives in so many ways – but isn’t it wonderful to have a TV show that inspires people to write, to act, to create companies like Big Finish… It blows me away!

At the BFI, there was a clip from the documentary on the new set showing you and Stewart Bevan going back to the locations of The Green Death – we see your reaction on screen when you saw him in Bessie, but what did you think when you read the script or heard the idea for the documentary?

There was no script. No – there was only a script for that lovely piece written by Pete McTighe. No, darling, are you kidding? No script – we just go into the freezing cold and get on with it with the wonderful Chris Chapman at the helm and his team rolling around in the mud with you. You are thinking on your feet, which are frozen, but I’m well versed in that. Poor Stewart isn’t – he wasn’t on much of the location filming. He was saying to me, “I was lying around with a big luminous green blob on my neck while you were running around the slag heaps.” I also went down in the cage to a mine, which was fascinating.

As it was unscripted, now and again you say things and think, “Did I really say that?!” (laughs) It was challenging and fun – so many lost memories come to you in the moment. It was very touching meeting the miners again after all these years, and some of the boys, all grown up now, who skived off school to watch the filming with Jon and the Spider.

The whole thing was improvised, which I have to do a lot in my work, so every word that came out of our mouths, we have to take full responsibility for! (laughs).

As we were driving around in Bessie, I remembered so many things: Jon and so much of my childhood was spent in this part of Wales. My father – J.L. Manning, OBE –campaigned for safer working conditions and higher wages for miners. One of my cousins played rugby for Wales and my cousin Clive Hicks-Jenkins is a very successful artist. My horse Nimrod was kept on the Jenkins family farm. Stewart is full Welsh and rightly very, very proud of that!

I had all that in my head as well, but this trip wasn’t about me. It was about going back and meeting those wonderful people who’d been touched by Doctor Who, hearing their memories and stories and sharing all this with Stewart who is still my dearest friend to this day.

It was very exciting. Bessie blowing up was one of the great moments! You can see it as a clip at the end – Jon telling Stewart that he’s just wasn’t handling the old girl right (laughs).

It was an incredible feeling but also slightly overwhelming in a way, going back. Although we have wonderful memories of being there, it was also just another amazing day in the office – and a very sad time. Jon and I knew that this was our parting, so it was a deeply emotional location. Much of our location time was spent sitting together thinking this was it. So many memories are tied up in this emotion so a great deal of the other memories were a little foggy.

Jon and I did have an incredible friendship and working relationship – the whole team, but especially Jon and myself – and by the time we got to the studio, thank goodness there was little dialogue at the end, that’s all I can say. Nobody could speak – it was a deeply emotional, but a wonderful and important story.

Barry Letts, and indeed so did Stewart and I, knew there was a huge problem beginning to manifest and how this planet was suffering. We had to start making changes. Thnk how long ago this was, and things haven’t really got better, in fact worse. That is quite frightening when you realize how long ago this was made, and you look at how far we should have come but haven’t.

The moment when Stewart and I were thinking about that on the farm, and then we saw those magnificent windmills up there – which he’d talked about as Professor Jones – then alternative meat sources made from mushroom, now known as Quorn but not created until the 1980s.

Many other things that were discussed in that series have subsequently come into being too. I think that’s pretty amazing considering it was 1973. It was very forward thinking as was Barry Letts, and I was so proud to have been part of that and to leave with a show that said something powerfully important – and indeed, starting it with Terror of the Autons, a look at plastics. All the storylines did have something to say about different world problems but also the excitement of adventure.

In your career generally, what dictated your choice of scripts? You’ve worked on some fantastic plays – The Odd Couple with Jack Klugman…

It was enormous fun. I loved working with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. It was an honour and I was a huge fan of The Odd Couple. You learn every time you go to work, from some incredible people that you’re blessed to work with. However, for me Educating Rita by Willy Russell, who writes so beautifully for women, says so much that is important along with Tom Stoppard that I did a season of his plays at the Vic, and I loved Me and Jezebel. I have been very lucky to work in the West End in several productions, and in Australia, including the Opera House where I also directed a play, and in the USA.

I really like plays that punch you in the gut and say something important, especially with dark humour, so I am doing film and audio and until another play like that does come up, I won’t do any more. Light comedy is delightful and much needed but I also like theatre that makes me go away and think!

It needs to challenge an audience…

Exactly. Theatre, television and in general all the arts are a great place to say something provocative and thought-provoking. Shakespeare was doing just that in theatre hundreds of years ago.

And Stoppard is great too – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is so clever…

It’s brilliant; I’m always using quotes from it. Jumpers was another brilliant play.

I’ve been very lucky doing plays by great writers like Simon Gray’s Otherwise Engaged which I did with Martin Shaw, and that certainly left audiences with their mouths open in shock.

And you’ve done the farces…

I think most actors do at some point; it’s a really difficult skill to do properly and I learnt from some greats. Some farces are superb and others, with no disrespect, are done to bring up your children, pay your rent, and allow you to continue doing what you really love. I’d rather do a really bad play or film than not work. The lighter stuff is fun but it doesn’t stay with you.

John Cusack said he did the big films like Con Air to be able to do the more interesting smaller films…

Exactly. If I didn’t do more commercial roles while I was bringing up my children alone, I wouldn’t have been able to do plays like Me and Jezebel which was a true story about Bette Davis.

What was the genesis of that?

I had always loved multi-voicing. When I wrote my own play, Not a Well Woman, in which I play about twenty characters, and I did on stage in the USA to prove I could, so playing nine characters on stage seemed perfect. My partner Barry Crocker who directed it said, “You do a brilliant Bette too, so I think you should do it as a one woman show” and I said “You are totally bonkers.” It was very successful touring right across Australia and the outback, places where people had never seen a play before. It was so exciting. Bette wasn’t thrilled though she kept looking at me and saying [in Bette Davis voice] “What the hell are we doing here !” From there I took it to Hampstead and then the Edinburgh Festival.

It’s such a lovely play because you see Bette outside of her comfort zone, away from the PR. It’s a true story, and the letter I read at the end is written by Bette Davis to Elizabeth Fuller who wrote the play. It was to her that it happened. It was a wonderful piece and you learn so much more about Bette Davis.

You know Jo Grant/Jones better than anybody else – but do you find that sense of identity in other characters you play where you’re not the originator?

Yes. You can’t help it. Bette was talking to me – literally would talk to me periodically. Sometimes when I was rehearsing it. Bette didn’t like Barry very much and Barry would say, “Can I speak to Elizabeth please?” (because I was also playing a four year old child in it as well) “Can I talk to anybody but Bette right now?” Especially in cases like that where you’re multi-voicing, you have to have every character and their emotions so clearly drawn in your head because you’re going to be interrupting yourself with the other voices of the other people that you’re playing, with a different emotion. You have to really take those characters on.

There are a few you take home, but there lies the way to madness. You have to try very hard, particularly when you’ve got children, not to go home with too many of the characters that you’re playing. You have to find that moment that you breathe them out. While you’re playing them you have to be deeply involved. You are, for that moment, becoming that person and investing everything you have in finding how to be that person and trying to get that across.

Do you bring yourself into that, or are you looking at it objectively, trying to find out about the person?

No, it’s about the person. I stay at home, darling. I don’t go out. I never leave the house. Even when I do conventions – because basically I’m quite withdrawn and shy but nobody ever believes that because I’m very full of energy. Sometimes I’m playing somebody who’s very still – it’s nothing to do with me. I completely want to find and envelop myself in the characters I played, and that included Jo. There may have seemed to be bits of me, and fans might say, “you’re just like Jo”, but Jo was a character that we did create.

That was the interesting comment you made at the BFI, almost against “received wisdom” that “Jo equals Katy equals Jo” is that you resisted the writers bringing too much of you across into Jo.

That seems to defeat acting to me. That takes away the craft, all the years of learning. I’d always, since I was a tiny child, been other people. I dream as other people!

So is that what got you into acting – you wanted that ability to be other people in front of other people?

I never thought of it being in front of other people. I just found that I was so comfortable, because I was so shy, very withdrawn and very myopic so everything to me was sound. I never thought as acting as being in front of other people – you learn your craft later about audiences and being able to feel within the first few seconds whether it’s a comedy, whether they’re going to laugh at the physical or the intellectual, and you learn how to work with your audiences. I started in television and that was magical to me – but I never thought about it going out to other people. I never thought, “One day I’m going to be an actress, one day I’m going to be a big star.” That never crossed my mind, and that’s the truth, for one second. I did it because I wanted to.

What’s been the most challenging role that you played?

Two of the most challenging roles after Doctor Who were tie dying and other crafts in Serendipity at the BBC in the day while playing a sixteen year old mass murdering girl guide at the Edinburgh Festival at night! (laughs)

No, having started in the ground-breaking John Braine series of Man at The Top with Kenneth Haigh prior to Doctor Who, Douglas Camfield (director of many Doctor Who stories, but none during my time, and one of my twins’ twelve godparents), cast me as the junkie Joanne in Target with Patrick Mower, then as the first lesbian on television in a true court case, written by a woman.

The television play was challenging because it was a subject that in those days had not been dealt with on television before – it was about a middle aged suburban housewife’s fight for the custody of her children after it was discovered by her husband that she was having an affair with the female lodger.

Douglas had to fight for me as many said, “Little Katy, she couldn’t possibly play those roles – she’s the girl next door type.” Douglas said, “You wait and see!” I proved him right and the doubters wrong . A huge challenge for an inexperienced actress and I’m very proud of what I did.

It shocked a lot of people as there was not even a teeny weeny scrap of Jo Grant in sight!

It would be great to see those again – I always hope Target will get a DVD release.

They did show the play at the BFI. I think Target should be released – it was a great series with Patrick Mower, and as television as moving forward in the way that it was shot. It was powerfully shot – all those opening scenes. It was excellent.

And the love for Jo continues to this day…

Seeing the trailer that Benjamin Cook did so beautifully, I actually had tears in my eyes. It really hit me how terrific this era was and what incredibly dedicated and talented teams worked on it then and indeed now, and how unbelievably blessed I am to be part of the magnificent world of Doctor Who. I am so very grateful.

 

Doctor Who: The Collection Season 10 is available now; click here to order from Amazon.co.uk

 

Thanks to Kate Hunter at BBC Studios for her help in arranging this interview, and to Katy Manning for the archive pictures.