Lis focussed on the dramatic difference between the robust character of Sarah Jane (outlined by Letts) and the previous female companions, most of whom were plot devices. Their relationship was cordial but Lis characterises him as patronising and controlling indeed, she sums up the DOCTOR WHO team as “a bit of a boys club”. When Lis first met Pertwee, he got her name wrong (calling her Katy) and broke down in tears. Lis’s steady career arc through the 1960’s and into the 1970s took an abrupt upswing when Barry Lett’s invited her in for an interview. Later, she started work in provincial theatre (as an ASM ) but later going on to work with Yorkshire playwright, Alan Ayckbourn in the coastal town of Scarborough where she met her future husband (Brian Miller) and eventually found work in television (Coronation Street then Z-Cars) and that was when she started to ‘get noticed’ and her career truly started to take off. Highlight: during a school play, she vomited on one of the players, someone called Edwina Cohen, aka Edwina Currie.
Sladen discovered that she wanted to be a performer very early on. Her run-ins with Paddy Russell and others with similar oppressive personalities and the problems with those who failed to offer any direction at all because they were driven by process (e.g. If you kept track of her many interviews over the years, there is nothing new here.
Unsurprisingly, her engrossing & heartfelt account is devoid of surprises and malice. This is human interaction, as we listen to Caroline John, representing Lis, and David Tennant, who provide the foreword (he calls Lis “magical”), and Brian Miller, Lis’s husband, who offers parting words will move you to tears. But the audio version (unabridged across 12 CDs) is more powerful still. As Brian Miller, Lis’s husband, says in his postscript, “You are the reason it was written”. Lis Sladen’s autobiography, ELISABETH SLADEN – AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, is a love letter possessing irresistible poignancy.
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