Despite my disgraceful grumping about last Saturday’s Doctor Who, I’m, obviously, still hopelessly devoted to the show and thus excited to an equally disgraceful degree when I get to interview any of the cast. This afternoon, it was a telephone call to Elisabeth Sladen. Yer actual Sarah Jane Smith!

She was lovely, but seemed a teeny bit … I dunno … fragile?

So, here are my two favourite bits.

On when she embraced the fact she’d never be free of her association with Doctor Who:

“It was after I’d been to America. I wouldn’t do conventions here because someone else was playing the assistant on screen, so I did totally walk away. But in America they would show episodes scene-by-scene and you would be quizzed. Then, all of sudden, the videos were out over here.

“Then Jon [Pertwee] and I, at the beginning of the 1990s, did the radio shows together and he said, ‘You idiot, Lizzy, you’ve got to get out and promote these!’. That’s when I just started to think, ‘Well, yes. It’s not going to make any difference now’. So that was the turnaround.”

On Stepping Stones:

“Oh it was great fun, I loved doing it. I went up to Yorkshire to do that. We had to wear our own clothes, they had no budget. So I got a bed jacket, a second-hand Oxfam thing, and I thought, ‘They’ll have to buy me stuff now, it looks so awful’. They made me wear it [Laughs]. I had to wear it! ‘Oh, that looks nice!’. It was awful, green, pink and blue.

“I did that on and off for three years, and then it went into My World. “