FEATURE BY NICHOLAS PEGG
Former Doctor Who companion Lalla Ward tells a deliciously funny story about the time when, in the autumn of 1979, she accompanied Tom Baker and Graham Crowden, with whom they were then busy rehearsing The Horns of Nimon, to the Odeon in Leicester Square for a screening of that season’s must-see science-fiction hit, Ridley Scott’s Alien. Alas, the Nimon party was not entirely won over. Unimpressed by the film’s slow pace, Tom Baker apparently lost his patience and, during a particularly quiet moment, the instantly recognisable voice of TV’s Doctor Who boomed around the cinema: “Why don’t they all just go down into the cargo hold and bore the alien to death?”
The young Hurt in an early TV role.