Doctor Who legend reveals actors came up with their own backstory
Doctor Who icon Carole Ann Ford has revealed she and William Hartnell developed their characters' backstory to make sense of the BBC show.
Doctor Who legends William Hartnell and Carole Ann Ford had to come up with their own backstory.
The duo played the first after Doctor and his companion Susan Foreman respectively, and Carole has recalled how they invented their own explanation for the beginnings of the Time Lord's journey through space and time before they'd started filming An Unearthly Child.
She admitted they were "never given any" backstory, adding to RadioTimes.com: "Bill and I put our heads together and we made it up.
"We thought that the most likely thing was that the TARDIS was not this year's model. It was a previous model which had been tarted up a bit, and the tarted up bits weren't quite working as smoothly as they should have done.
"So Bill, my grandfather, was in a huge sort of aircraft hangar-type place with loads and loads and loads of other TARDISes, all being tinkered with.
"And he was tinkering away with it and making everything work more smoothly, when suddenly there was an invasion from another planet."
From there, they decided that they escaped in "only a partially-working TARDIS", which was "fiddled with throughout the series".
Carole - who returned to Doctor Who most recently for the Interstellar Song Contest episode last year - pointed out that they needed to create some kind of history for themselves, to help inspire their performances for the BBC show.
She said: "An actor has to have an idea of what happened before you stepped through the door, and also what's going to happen after you step through the other door."
Meanwhile, she noted how that she loved that he "took it all very seriously" on set, and was "a real perfectionist" about the whole show.
She added: "Unless you're doing it seriously, it doesn't mean anything to the audience.
"If you're thinking, 'Oh, a load of rubbish', then how are the audience going to ever accept what's going on and be entertained by it?
"We got rid of all our giggles about the various monsters in rehearsals, and just as well we did, because sometimes I look back and I think, 'How did I ever keep a straight face?!'"
