P is for... Polly

The Doctor first met Polly when he and companion Dodo Chaplet visited the newly opened General Post Office Tower in July 1966. She was employed there as secretary to the scientist Professor Brett, who was completing work on his brainchild WOTAN - Will Operating Thought ANalogue. This was a computer designed to be a universal problem-solver, which would co-ordinate other machines across the western world. Polly quickly befriended Dodo and invited her to a new club in Covent Garden named the Inferno, which her friend Kitty ran. On arrival Kitty asked Polly for help in cheering up a young seaman who had been visiting recently, and who sat quietly at the corner of the bar. This was Ben Jackson, who was upset at being left in barracks whilst his friends sailed for the West Indies. When Polly was harassed by another customer, ben stepped in and defended her. She was angry initially, but the two soon became friends.

WOTAN meanwhile had outgrown its programming and had decided that human beings were not fit to run the planet. Only a superior machine mind like it could do so. It began mentally enslaving people - beginning with Brett - who would be put to work to ensuring that it took over. This involved building War Machines - mobile armoured computers.

Dodo was also enslaved, and soon after Polly fell under WOTAN's influence. When ben went looking for her at a warehouse near the club, he was captured. Spotting a chance to escape, Polly's true personality resurfaced momentarily and she allowed him to go free instead of reporting it. She then agreed to accept WOTAN's punishment for this. 

On arriving at the Post Office Tower, however, WOTAN came under attack by a War machine reprogrammed by the Doctor. Once destroyed, Polly and its other slaves were freed.

Polly received a message from Dodo that she was going to stay on in London, so Polly and ben arranged to meet the Doctor at the TARDIS landing site of Fitzroy Square. As they left they saw the Doctor enter a Police Box, and ben remembered that he had picked up a key he had dropped earlier - one which fitted the TARDIS lock. The pair entered just as the Doctor dematerialised, and soon found themselves in 17th Century Cornwall.

Polly seemed to grasp that they had travelled in time and space more easily than her cynical companion.

Wearing trousers, and with her long blonde hair hidden under a cap, the Doctor and ben initially passed her off as a boy - 'Paul'. She and Ben were soon accused of a murder and found themselves locked up. They pretended to be witches in order to scare a superstitious local boy into letting them go free.

After an adventure involving pirates, smugglers and hidden treasure, Polly next found herself in the year 1986, when the TARDIS landed near the South Pole.

In the Snowcap space tracking station, she and Ben first encountered the Cybermen. Their planet Mondas - Earth's long lost sister world - had wandered back into the Solar System after many centuries.

Polly was appalled at their lack of emotions. At one point she was taken to one of their spaceships to be held as hostage.

After Mondas absorbed too much of the Earth's energy and disintegrated - destroying the Cybermen - she and ben were confronted by the Doctor's sudden collapse back in the TARDIS. To their amazement they saw him change appearance.

Once again, Polly was quicker to accept the evidence of her own eyes, whilst Ben refused for a long time to accept that this stranger was the Doctor.

It was only after he had defeated the Daleks on the earth colony on Vulcan that he began to accept. Polly was once again taken hostage here, this time by rebels seeking the overthrow of the colony's governor.

Shortly after arriving in the Highlands of Scotland, close to the battle site of Culloden, 1746, Ben and Polly encountered a party of Jacobite refugees. Amongst them was a young piper named Jamie who would become a good friend and travel with them in the TARDIS. First they had to contend with Redcoat soldiers and a crooked Edinburgh solicitor named Grey, who schemed to sell the Scots into slavery. Polly made friends with Kirsty, daughter of the Laird of McLaren. She was initially annoyed at Kirsty's defeatist attitude. They succeeded in blackmailing a Redcoat officer named Algernon ffinch, which helped them in their efforts to rescue the Doctor, Ben and the Scots captives. They posed as orange sellers around the docks of Inverness in order to gain information about them.

Jamie's first trip in the TARDIS took them all to an island, beneath which lay the remnants of the lost civilisation of Atlantis. Here Polly was almost transformed surgically into a Fish Worker. She then posed as an Atlantean woman to help the Doctor defeat the mad schemes of a scientist named Zaroff, which included her posing as the voice of the local deity, Amdo.

Polly then had a second encounter with the Cybermen after the TARDIS landed on the Moon, in the year 2070. Despite their upgraded appearance she still recognised them as the creatures she had met at the South Pole. Captive in the medical bay with Ben and Jamie, it was she who realised that a powerful solvent could attack the plastic components of their chest units - in the same way her nail varnish remover worked. Despite coming up with the idea of "Polly's Cocktail", the men would not allow her to take part in their escape bid. She followed on anyway.

Another Earth colony was visited next - this one plagued by gigantic crab-like monsters called Macra. On first arriving, Polly had enjoyed a make-over, her long hair cut short. 

The colonists had been brainwashed into refusing to accept that the Macra existed, and the Doctor had ensured that Polly and Jamie were not processed in the same way. Unfortunately, Ben - thanks in part to his background in naval discipline - was hypnotised into blindly following the laws of the colony. Polly was sent to work in the "Danger Gang", helping to drill for a toxic gas upon which the Macra thrived.

She, the Doctor and Jamie were saved when ben finally shook off the mental conditioning, and the Macra were destroyed.

Polly's travels with the Doctor ended on the same day as Ben's - which just happened to be the very day on which they had first entered the TARDIS back in Fitzroy Square. They had landed at Gatwick Airport, south of London, and Polly had hidden from a policeman in a hangar belonging to Chameleon Youth Tours. There she witnessed a murder. After informing her friends she was abducted by one of the airline staff - really an alien Chameleon. This race had lost their physical identities and had come to Earth to take on the appearances of humans, kidnapped on their flights. Her appearance was taken on by one of the aliens, so that the Doctor and Jamie were shocked to see her a short time later claiming not to know them. She insisted she was Michelle Lueppi, from Switzerland. Ben was captured soon after, and both were held miniaturised and in suspended animation on the Chameleon space station, in orbit above the Earth.

After the Doctor had ended the alien scheme, Polly and Ben learned of the date and realised that they could return to their old lives as though they had never been away. The Doctor asked Polly to help look after Ben, and they set off for London.

Many years later Ben and Polly were said to still be together, running an orphanage in India.

Played by: Anneke Wills. Appearances: The War Machines (1966) - The Faceless Ones (1967).

• Anna Katarina Willys (born Oct 1941) first came to fame in a TV adaptation of The Railway Children, in 1957.
• At the time she accepted the part of Polly she was married to actor Michael Gough, who had only recently appeared in the series as the Toymaker. She had been put forward for the series back in 1963 when they were looking for someone to play Barbara, but Wills did not attend the audition.
• On leaving the series she continued her career briefly before dropping out of the public eye. In pre-internet days, all contact with her was lost. Following her divorce she had taken herself around the world, living in an artists colony in Canada and an ashram in India. On returning to the UK she reconnected with the series through the nascent convention circuit. She was a controversial figure in that she was the first to openly discuss William Hartnell's problematic attitudes, where before there had been a respectful silence around these.
• Her departure from the series is also controversial in that publicly she has always maintained that she was asked to stay on whilst Michael Craze was to be dropped, now that Frazer Hines was on the show. However, it has been claimed that Innes Lloyd wanted rid of her because of certain prima donna-ish demands she was making.
• She was supposed to make a cameo appearance in The Power of the Doctor in 2022 - the reason for the empty chair at the companions support group - but dropped out at the last minute.
• Though never stated on screen, Polly had the surname "Wright". The character bio claimed that she came from Chelsea, got her job through a rich uncle named Charles (who featured in her audition piece when he was kidnapped by Daleks), and had briefly been a model. She also spoke a number of European languages.