Best known to genre fans for her role as Ace – aka Dorothy McShane – the last companion of the classic era of Doctor Who, Sophie Aldred has reprised the part regularly since the series went on hiatus in 1989, for various TV shows and then regularly for Big Finish. To promote the Season 26 Blu-ray, she appeared in a short trailer showing a mature Ace, head of the A Charitable Earth foundation (an idea first mentioned in The Sarah Jane Adventures), and has now penned a full-length novel, At Childhood’s End, which shows Ace meeting the 13th Doctor (and explaining some of the loose ends from the classic show). The day before it was published, she chatted with Paul Simpson…

At Childhood’s End captures the classic Doctor Who elements really well, but with you and Steve Cole and Mike Tucker involved, that didn’t really surprise me

It’s almost like Mike is my companion! I didn’t tell him that. We all gathered together on Sunday and had a bit of a celebration. Mike and I know Ace inside out and there’s something about working together which works because we’ve got a shorthand.

So, let’s go back to the beginning. How did you get involved with doing the novel,

It was extraordinary. I’d just done the trailer for the Season 26 Blu-ray set and Steve Cole [from BBC Books] got in touch and said ‘I want to talk to you about doing an Ace novel’. I was like, wow amazing! He and Mike and I got together in a little shop in Wendover – we live in a triangle and Wendover’s right in the middle. We had chocolate together and I told them some of my ideas for Ace now…

I was very taken by the trailer that Pete McTighe had written which was of course based on the mention that Russell T Davies gave to Ace in The Sarah Jane Adventures. “Somebody called Dorothy running A Charitable Earth” which I initially thought was a bit lame – that’s not something that I’d thought of Ace doing. We’d had Big Finish and the New Adventures; we’d had all sorts of possible endings including her death in the comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine.

For me, it was all right there in my head. I had just been Ace, standing in that penthouse overlooking the Tower of London so I was thinking about how we could tie up all the ends as well. Could we find out why Ace has all these possible endings and these kind of almost split personalities?

So that was one thing, and then how the heck is she gonna meet up with the thirteenth Doctor? That, for me, and I think for the classic fans is the moment that everybody’s been waiting for, in a way, for all these years, when an ex companion meets the incumbent Doctor – it was so moving with David Tennant when he met Lis Sladen.

This is what we’ve been waiting for. So that was very important to me, to get that right.

And then the other thing was of course introducing Jodie’s Doctor and all her companions – because it’s a phalanx of companions, with the three of them, which I’d never experienced before. Writing for all three of them and the Doctor and Ace and all the characters around Ace, from the past – that was the challenge really.

And then finding a hook and finding a way to do that that brings it all together.

So did the three of you put together the storyline?

We talked about all these ideas and then Mike and Steve went away and put all the ideas together. Then we’d have exchanges of emails and I’d be like, ‘Oh well maybe not that’… What was brilliant was it was a collaboration. We only had from our meeting in the coffee shop in July to the delivery date in October and that is not very much time.

As I say in the acknowledgements, there would be no way I could have done that without Steve and Mike. It came down to scrambling a synopsis together, then the bullet points of the storyline, then a long synopsis and finally taking each scene and putting the flesh on the bones. It was such a great collaboration.

You’ve been involved in a non fiction book before [Ace!, written with Mike Tucker] but writing a fiction book, what surprised you about the process?

I think the fact that it was easy to write for Ace because of knowing her so well. I don’t know if I could write a novel about anything else.

Having had 32 years in the world of Doctor Who I think – and you must feel this as well and other fans of the programme – it’s in your DNA. And whilst I think I didn’t realise that, maybe this has been the realization of that. The kind of culmination of all these years and all this input – because I think if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Somebody asked me a brilliant question at a convention, years ago, I think it was in America. Deb Watling, Nicola Bryant and I were on stage together and somebody asked, ‘If you hadn’t been Ace, Victoria and Peri, what would you be like now? How much of you now as a person is informed by your character and how much of your character is informed by you?’

We all agreed that actually we can’t tell. I’m the youngest of those, and I’ve been with the character for 32 years, coming up to 33 now. That’s more of my life than I was before playing Ace. So who I am must now be in large part to do with the character of Ace and also moulded by all the conventions and when people ask questions. I’m fascinated to find out about the history of Doctor Who. I know things now that I would never have known before about the other Doctors and the other companions.

Writing is difficult, I find. That’s why I do acting because that’s much easier for me. I was very very concerned about the “legacy” fans, as well as new fans of the show and so I was always writing with them in mind. What do they want to know Ace has been up to? What would be a really satisfying conclusion about Ace and what’s been going on with her for all these years?

Do you feel that you brought her to a conclusion now? This could be the launch pad for more adventures.

The way we thought about it first, it was going to be almost like, “oh well she’s found a new thing to do,” and then of course I just thought, “I’m not letting this story end!” I have a strong feeling that Ace would always be inextricably linked with the Doctor forever.

The Doctor was so much a part of her formative years, sixteen to whatever she was in Survival, we don’t really know, maybe early twenties… I think those moments you have at that age never leave you.

There’s the whole idea that he was training her up for something as well in those days. That he knew what he was about, he knew what he was doing. So yes, I’d love to think that this is actually a new beginning.

And of course by serendipity last month there was Guy Adams’ Big Finish audio Dark Universe. Did it feel odd, working as a very different version of Ace but still the Charitable Earth older version?

You know what? It doesn’t because the thing is there’s all the alternative Aces – Big Finish and all their branches of Ace, the Virgin New Adventures and Doctor Who Magazine. What I always do is look at what’s in the script. That’s where you start as an actor: what’s on the page? What is this writer writing for Ace to do? I am thrilled that people have had so many brilliant ideas for Ace and what happened to her and what’s going to happen to her – because otherwise it would have got a bit boring by now, to be quite honest, running around shouting Wicked! and chucking nitro-9 around.

I think it was pointed out in the series, especially in season 26, that there was more to the Doctor than meets the eye, plus there was something that he was up to with Ace and that we don’t really know what. So that could have gone anywhere really and I think that the writers have been inspired by that to take her anywhere is really thrilling for me.

At Childhood’s End is by no means a definitive account of what happened to Ace. It’s a take. Maybe we might write another book on the fact that Ace stayed in the TARDIS forever with the Doctor. Or we might write another book about how she went off to Gallifrey and became a Time Lord?

That’s what I love about this: nothing is set in stone, there’s no definitive version of what happened to Ace.

Ditto to an extent with Sylvester’s Doctor, we know where he ends up, walking into a hail of bullets, but an awful lot happened in that time…

…and we don’t know how long that period of time is either. All we know there is Ace is not there anymore. This is what’s so great about this legacy of Doctor Who and the way the writers are bringing their imaginations to bear on these possible differences. Anything is possible. It’s extraordinary. There’s no other programme like it, is there? No other programme that you could go at one minute, ‘oh yeah the Doctor and Ace are going off to do this, oh hang on a minute the Doctor’s a different person now. Oh wait a sec, Ace is doing that! Oh!’ It’s fantastic.

How did you find writing Jodie’s Doctor?

The great thing is that I have portrayed her Doctor on audiobook and when you do an audiobook you do embed yourself into the characters that you’re reading. I’m right in the middle of one at the moment and it’s kinda living with me. I found that with Jodie’s Doctor. I hope I do a passable imitation of her accent. I think what I have got is her enthusiasm and her excitement. Although this season I’m noticing brilliantly that they’re giving her a bit more gravitas. It’s great.

It reminds me a little bit of Sylvester’s first few stories: when he was introduced they weren’t quite sure who he was and then they hit their stride and by season 26 you’ve got this impressive “Who is this guy?”. I think the same is true of Jodie, especially in that episode where she’s actually getting snapping with her companions…You just think “ooooh hang on a minute”.

I watch as much as possible. I’m fascinated to see a female Doctor and how that works, so it was not too much of a stretch to be writing for her.

To an extent, I think what Terrance Dicks always said applies – effectively ‘The Doctor is the Doctor is the Doctor’. The surface and the mannerisms and speech patterns change but essentially it’s basically the same person.

Yes and you’re always aware that this Doctor is an ancient being as well and not human. It’s very tempting to put human feelings and human emotions into his thoughts.

As I recall, that was the rule with Virgin’s New Adventures – they never went inside the Doctor’s head because you couldn’t understand him.

The Doctor is the Doctor. Inscrutable, two hearts, maybe two brains at least.

Two brains and a whole new Doctor we knew nothing about so… If nothing else this season is surprising us.

Absolutely

Has writing this whetted your appetite to do another one?

As long as it could be a collaboration. I couldn’t tackle any of it on my own that’s for sure. I love being with people, I love the process of acting work – even audio books, I’m with a sound engineer, I’m with a team.

I wouldn’t enjoy, if I was just sitting in a room on my own. The Ace! book that Mike and I did back in the day, we were in constant collaboration over that and Gary Russell came on board to do editing. I love that process of firing ideas off of people and collaboration. So yes, if I could do that, that would be great.

 

Thanks to Chloe Rose for her assistance in setting up this interview.

At Childhood’s End is out now from BBC Books; click here to read our review,