Anita Dobson teases the Rani's return to Doctor Who following Mrs Flood cliffhanger as she talks new role

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Anita Dobson suspects you get more fearless as you get older. “You should do, shouldn’t you?” she says conspiratorially. “The third time they asked me to do Strictly,” she continues, by way of explanation, “my best friend said to me, ‘You love dancing. Why do you keep saying no?’ I said, ‘I suppose I’m a bit scared of making a fool of myself.’ And she said, ‘At 62, do you care?’ And in that moment, I realised I didn’t.”

So, in 2011, she signed up for the ninth series of Strictly Come Dancing, continuing in the competition until a very respectable ninth week. There were scary moments during her Strictly experience, but Dobson used fear, not as a brake, but as an engine.

Fearlessness features in Never Too Late, the first of 5’s reinvention of Play for Today, the classic series of one-off plays broadcast on the BBC from 1970 to 1984. Dobson plays Cynthia, a sprightly senior citizen who, after one too many funny turns, is packed off to a retirement village by her daughter (Tracy-Ann Oberman). This institutional life ill-fits free-spirit Cyn and soon she’s protesting about rules and regulations – and quite possibly railing against the distant but encroaching dying of the light.

If the drama is a meditation on mortality, it’s one with gags about escaped snakes and randy pensioners – and Nigel Havers. He pops up as Frank, Cynthia’s estranged former flame and faded 60s crooner. Capers ensue, secrets are revealed and there’s some singing.

“After I read it, I rang them straightaway and said, ‘Yes, definitely. 100 per cent.’ I was gung-ho to get on board,” Dobson enthuses, “especially as it was giving people opportunities who might not otherwise get them.” Like the other Plays for Today, Never Too Late was commissioned by 5 with the express intention of championing new behind-the-scenes talent. A laudable ambition that, upon watching the Plays, you wish 5 had believed in a bit more and invested just a bit more budget.

“We did it on a shoestring, in a ridiculously short amount of time and I was in every scene but one. But I thought, ‘You’re here for the duration. Get up early, get on set, do your job, set an example.’” And you can bet she did.

Dobson and her career have been shaped by a series of fearless choices, like deciding to become an actor in the first place. She was born into postwar privation in Stepney, east London. Her parents were in the rag trade – her father a dress cutter and her mother working “part-time as a tailoress”. There was no familial theatricality.

Still, the augurs were there. The young Anita was a member of the Ivy Travers Dance Troupe and, at four, she was so enchanted by a pantomime at the Hackney Empire that “my grandfather said, ‘She’s got sawdust in her blood.’ ” Later, she learnt to tap-dance, entered talent competitions when they went on holidays and became a juvenile coat model for C&A.

“I always thought I should have been a magician’s assistant. Being on show, looking fabulous, I would have gone down a storm.”

But it was a school trip to see Marlon Brando and James Mason in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film Julius Caesar that proved an epiphany. “I looked at James Mason and listened to that voice and thought, ‘I want to do that. I want to make people listen. I want to change their way of thinking. I want to have a beautiful voice and I want to capture people’s imagination’ – because he sure as hell captured mine.”

At school however, there was very little of the arts apart from “staring at a wringer for what felt like an eternity in Mr Dubowski’s art class in an effort to put it onto canvas”. Dobson left with few qualifications, and got her first job at the Prudential Assurance Company – “It was like being buried alive.”

It wasn’t until another job, at a company that made tassels (“curtains, before you get excited”), that Dobson decided enough was enough. “In the end, I went home and said,

‘OK, I’m going to be an actress.’ With my mum’s help, I found somewhere to go. I did some touch-typing in the day to earn a few bob to pay my mum rent, and in the evenings I’d go to am-dram. And that’s where it all started.”

It was there, at an am-dram group run by the Inner London Education Authority, that Dobson made another bold choice: to go with the group to Czechoslovakia on an exchange programme. It was the summer of 1968, Dobson was 19 and ready to perform a new piece of theatre about life in the East End – Oi! The Musical.

“Me and my friend Brenda went off on a coach to Prague, which was the first time out of the country without my family,” Dobson recalls. “We got to where we were to be staying in this youth hostel on Wenceslas Square. And the first thing that happened? The Russians invaded. We woke up the next day and outside, the Square was full of tanks. All the way round, with boys around my age sitting in them, with guns. That’s when it hit us that this was an invasion and we were in the middle of it.”

What happened next sounds scary, surreal and almost cinematic. It involved getting back onto their coach – “We were told not to look left or right, not to talk to anyone, eyes down” – which drove off westward as the Soviets moved in from the east. They stopped, briefly, in one town but were forced to go further west to stay ahead of the wave of hard-line Communist forces sweeping across the country. They ended up in a little village with two shops – “one sold food and the other sold everything else”. That would be their hideout, their home, for the next two weeks.

When the villagers found out they were actors, they asked them to perform their show. So every night, after curfew, Dobson, Brenda and the rest of the troupe gave the villagers their Oi! The reception was rapturous. “This adoring fan club gave us rings, jewellery, boots… they insisted because we had performed for them. When we left, when all aliens were ordered out of the country, it was…” Dobson tails off as she wells up. There’s a beat of a sombre silence. Then, she says, breezily, “So that was my baptism of fire as far as acting is concerned!”

Two decades and a stint at drama school later and Dobson made another decision: to exit EastEnders. At the height of its popularity and her fame, she left behind the character of Angie Watts after playing her for three years. “I loved it,” she says with zest. “The maudlin drunk, the happy drunk, the hysterical drunk, the tearful drunk. I’m very, very proud of playing Angie because she gave me who I am today.

“Early on, I remember I had a scene on my own on the pub stairs with Roly the dog. I sat talking to him about my marriage, my life, my demons. I was stroking the dog and I started to cry. And I couldn’t stop, so I just went with it. I finished the scene and Roly didn’t move, and I didn’t move, and the whole set was silent. And I thought, ‘I’ve found her.’ Because inside that jolly, mad, awright darlin’ and the make-up and the hair and all that, there was this broken doll.”

Having grown up in the East End and worked in pubs, Dobson knew women like Angie. But even she sounds a bit awed by the Queen Vic landlady. “There are some characters you create and they are like a shell, behind which you hide. And there are other characters that come from your gut, that resonate so much that you become them. And those are the times when you fly, when you’re not acting, you’re not thinking, you’re just in the moment…”

With highs like that, it would have been easy to stay, to still be there today, perhaps. But Dobson was done. “By the time I got to EastEnders I was 35 or 36 and I remember thinking that the next train was leaving soon and I needed to get on that if I wanted to make, learn and do lots of different things.”

So she left EastEnders to be a jobbing actress? “I am a jobbing actress,” says Dobson with a smile. “It’s about being open to possibilities.”

This openness that led Dobson to another decision – to take what she thought at the time was a bit part in Doctor Who. It was only later that she, and the viewers, would discover that the nosy neighbour Mrs Flood was actually the Rani. A Time Lady originally played by Kate O’Mara and one of the Doctor’s most formidable foes, the role was “a fantastic gift”.

“For the first series, I was oblivious and just really enjoyed all the little character things and mannerisms that Russell [T Davies] was throwing at me,” she says. “Then, when he asked me back for another series, my curiosity was piqued as to who she was… But it wasn’t until I read the last few scripts of that series that I found out, and I was completely shocked.”

The last we saw of Dobson’s Rani, she eluded the Doctor’s grasp after her plan for galactic domination failed. Would she return to Doctor Who? “Anything is possible. And if Russell asked me now, I’d be out that door so quick.”

Despite her drive, Dobson still says “no” – and sometimes “never again”. After five decades, eight Snow Whites, seven Aladdins, four Dick Whittingtons, two Sleeping Beauties, and one Babes in the Wood, she won’t do another panto. Oh no she won’t. She doesn’t need the money: “Even with or without my Brian [May, her husband of 25 years], I’m OK. I’m obviously really OK with him.”

And she’s had that experience. “I can’t put that crown on again and scream my tits off for 12 shows a week for five weeks,” she sighs. “It’s unseemly, isn’t it? And it’s just too exhausting for a 76-year-old woman.” Fearlessness can take a person places. Up a beanstalk isn’t one of them.

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