Today we wish Bonnie Langford a happy 58th birthday. She played companion Mel alongside the Sixth and Seventh Doctors. She first appeared, already part of the TARDIS team, in Terror of the Vervoids, the third section of Trial of a Time Lord. As this was a glimpse into the Doctor's near future, she never got a proper introductory story. The character left after the 24th Season, in Dragonfire, Langford only having agreed to one year to give herself some non-musical theatre acting experience.
Best known for her singing / dancing, and for portraying the brattish Violet Elizabeth Bott in Just William, her casting did not go down well with fans at the time. It was seen as the ultimate stunt casting by JNT, who was accused of wanting to push the series more towards light entertainment.
The character was badly conceived and Langford was not well served by the writers. A character trait on paper was that Mel was a computer programmer - but she never went near a computer in her whole 18 month stint.
She has since proven herself a very good straight actor.
Like Lalla Ward and Matthew Waterhouse, all of her Doctor Who episodes are now available on Blu-ray.
She shares her birthday with another companion actor, who was also badly served by the production team. Adrienne Hill's Katarina was already being written out before she even got to the screen. Katarina featured in the final episode of The Myth Makers, and the first four instalments of the subsequent The Daleks' Master Plan. Hill died in 1997, aged 60.
Today we also remember the actor Eric Chitty, who passed away on this date in 1977, aged 90.
He first appeared in the series as the apothecary Preslin in The Massacre, but is best known for his portrayal of the Time Lord Co-ordinator Engin in The Deadly Assassin, where he formed half of a Robert Holmes double act with George Pravda as Castellan Spandrell.
Patrick Newell also died on this date, in 1988 aged only 58.
He featured in several episodes of The Avengers before winning the regular role of "Mother" in the Tara King episodes. He gets the final line of the entire series. When Nicholas Courtney was unavailable to play the Brigadier in The Android Invasion, Newell stepped in to play a new character - Colonel Faraday.
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