Many past and present stars of Doctor Who appeared in a lavish photoshoot for a Radio Times special celebrating the show’s tenth anniversary. But let’s see where their careers were at in 1973…

By EDDIE ROBSON

Caroline John as Ann in Assassin.

Caroline John

William Russell as Ian Chesterton; Maureen O’Brien as Vicki; William Hartnell as the Doctor; Peter Purves as Steven Taylor; Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom; Michael Craze as Ben Jackson; Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon; Patrick Troughton as the Doctor; Anneke Wills as Polly; Caroline John as Dr Liz Shaw; Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield; Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot.

John had left Doctor Who in 1970 and given birth to her first child shortly afterwards, but swiftly resumed her acting career. She appeared in Kippers and White Wine, an entry in the Love Story anthology strand, written by John Lucarotti and broadcast on 14 March 1973. On 12 June she had a central role in the BBC2 play The Roses of Eyam, playing Catherine Mompesson in a two-hour dramatisation of a 1665 incident in which the plague spread from London to a Derbyshire village via a box of clothes. From 31 October she was in a three-part Crown Court story called No Spoiling, and she also had a role in the movie thriller Assassin, first released in late November.

Wendy Padbury

Padbury began the year at the London Coliseum, where she played (aptly enough) Wendy in a lavish Peter Pan revival starring Dorothy Tutin and Ron Moody, which had opened on 20 December 1972 and closed on 20 January. Back in 1971, however, she’d joined the cast of Southern Television’s Freewheelers, which aimed to capitalise on the youth audience for shows like ITC’s Department S by telling similar stories but with teenage characters. Padbury’s character, art student Sue Craig, had been introduced in the fifth season – but the eighth and final one, which aired in autumn 1973, comprised a single 13-part serial with Padbury as the star; none of the other kids from previous seasons returned. However, the timing proved a little awkward, as Padbury recalled in Doctor Who Magazine in 2018: “I found out I was pregnant more than halfway through location filming, before we moved into studio for 13 weeks.” Padbury’s daughter Jo was born in November, just a month after Freewheelers finished shooting, and from then on she only accepted small acting roles that fitted around her family: “I wasn’t really working, post Freewheelers.”