W
HEN
SFX
JOINS JANET Fielding for a natter, she’s on a break from recording a
Doctor
Who
audio play for Big Finish. But don’t expect her to divulge anything about the plot. “I could tell you, but I think I’d have to kill you!” she laughs. However, she can reveal that “It’s a fun story. It’s more episodes than usual. And as per usual it’s a great cast.”
Secrecy is nothing new for Fielding. NDAs accompany virtually every Doctor Who job she lands, whether it’s a documentary, commentary or audiobook. However, no project in recent years has been on quite the same scale as her return to the television series. A few white lies were told to ensure that the news didn’t leak. “I had to,” she stresses. “People all the time on Twitter were saying, ‘Wouldn’t you love to come back into Doctor Who?’ ‘Yes, I would!’ You know?”
RETURN TO OZ Tegan’s long-awaited comeback in “The Power Of The Doctor” was seemingly a wishfulfilment for showrunner and ’80s-era fan Chris Chibnall, who had expressed his desire to bring back the character in a February 2020 interview. Fielding was aware of his comments when Doctor Who casting director Andy Pryor contacted her.
“He asked whether I’d be interested in returning to the show. I thought about it for all of three seconds and then said yes,” she says. “And then I worried on all sorts of fronts. Because I hadn’t been in front of the camera for 37 years, would I be able to remember lines? I don’t need to learn lines any more, so I’m out of the habit.”
Fielding was given the opportunity to share her ideas on Tegan and where she might be in her life. “[Chibnall] liked them – I think they meshed with the sort of things in which he was interested. My theory was that you couldn’t travel in the TARDIS without being profoundly changed, and so the Tegan who went into the TARDIS was not the Tegan who eventually came out of the TARDIS. And that it changed the course of her life.”