Bonnie Langford: "I wasn't proud of my work on Doctor Who - until I came back"

Bonnie Langford begins our interview with an absolute power move. When she's quizzed about her first TV memories, she immediately asks: "Shows I watched, or shows I appeared on?"

It's the sort of clarification only a born performer can make. As a toddler, Langford was at home in the theatre. At six, she made her first TV appearance on Opportunity Knocks with Hughie Green. At 12, she landed her breakout role in ITV's Just William.

"I don't know that I ever [fell in love with performing], because I don't think I ever understood anything other than that," Langford tells Radio Times.

"My mum passed away recently and we were going through some of her boxes of things. I found a very old picture of me as a baby. I had a nappy on underneath a tutu, and I was kicking my leg and holding hands with my two sisters, who were looking after me. I think that represented what it meant to me – it was always a safe place for me.

"I think that has always been why I've continued for so long, because I didn't want to lose that environment. What goes on around it can be pretty awful and sometimes that's quite challenging. But I didn't want to give up that safe place."

It's nothing short of astonishing that Langford, now 61, still sees performing as a safe space considering how she was cruelly torn down in her younger years by the press, the public and even some of her peers. It's not hard to see the impact that still has on her, but also how she's classily risen above it.

While she's painfully self-critical at times, she's also just as joyful, effervescent and funny as she's ever been. She's also booked and busy, fresh from reprising her role as Melanie Bush in Doctor Who and returning to the stage in Paddington The Musical. In short? She's having the last laugh.

Langford never watched Doctor Who as a child ("It was too terrifying!") so her first real experience with it was when she ran into legendary producer John Nathan-Turner, who would later offer her the role of computer programmer Melanie Bush, alongside Colin Baker's and Sylvester McCoy's Sixth and Seventh Doctors.

"I just went into the show very blindly," Langford admits. "I enjoyed it tremendously. I had a good time doing it. But, were I to take it on now, I would probably focus on it slightly differently. I had no idea of the impact.

"It was interesting as well, because most of the time people who played the assistants, it was very early on in their careers, and certainly in their TV careers. So it was unusual to have a companion who had a profile.

"But at that point, the show was going through a lot of difficulty. John adored it and was fighting for its survival, and I have a feeling that I was brought into it because I was getting a lot of column inches at that time with publicity, and he knew that it would have an impact on that side of it."

Langford adds: "I have my views about my own performance in it... I was in a very different place in my life, but I was very earnest and very keen to do 100 per cent of my job, even if it didn't feel comfortable to me."

Looking back, she's incredibly critical of her own performance, insisting she would have done "hundreds" of things differently, adding: "I was just far too perky, far too big a performance... I think it was far too bouncy. [Mel] was very irritating."

In fairness, there were a lot of factors that contributed to Mel's characterisation. One was an outrageous character description that Langford was given when she was cast – and has recently rediscovered – that expressly described Mel as "irritating". Another was a cast and crew visit to Alton Towers that resulted in Nathan-Turner hearing Langford's impressive scream and including it in almost every episode.

Unbeknownst to her at first, Langford also joined Doctor Who in the midst of quite the tricky patch, with her first appearance coming in 1986's The Trial of a Time Lord, when Baker's Sixth Doctor was tried by the High Council of Time Lords for breaking the laws of Gallifrey.

"It was very serious, much more serious than I had expected," she recalls. "And I knew that I came into this difficult situation. Colin was fighting for the show as well as John, and there was a lot of angst, and a lot of notes."

"He loved the show," Langford says of Baker. "He was very loyal to it, and so I think he was used as a scapegoat a bit. If you stick your head above the parapet, it can be quite a dark place to be. But he found that the show had not been treated well, and I think he was upset about that."

Baker's exit came immediately after The Trial of a Time Lord, with the actor being replaced by McCoy, who Langford had previously worked with on stage. "It was almost like a fresh start for both of us," she recalled. But, after working on one more season, it was time for Langford to leave Doctor Who behind – or so she thought at the time.

"It's very strange when you're in shows like this, because you agree to do something for a set amount of time, and then nobody says anything about whether that's going to go on. It's the nature of our business. We don't know whether things are going to continue forever or whether they're going to be cancelled," she points out.

"These days, things get cancelled mid-scene. Somebody was telling me the other day that they were filming something in America and the suits walked on the set in the middle of a scene and said, 'That's it. We're not doing any more.' It's terrifying. Or you can be in something for years and years."

As McCoy previously revealed in an interview with Radio Times, it also took some convincing for Langford to actually get a proper exit scene.

"Yeah, they hadn't really accommodated at the end of the series that there would be a leaving!" Langford recalls. "Sylv said, 'We need a better scene,' so they came up with this new scene.

"I think I made it a bit schmaltzy, actually, myself, but it was fine. I would have done that differently now as well, but it was nice to at least have some kind of completion. But it did seem funny that she went off with Sabalom Glitz on a shopping ship!"

"I agreed to do it for two years. I didn't expect to stay. I didn't feel very proud of what I was doing. I had another job to go to, and that was that," she recalls of her exit. Except, that wasn't quite that.

In 2021, then-showrunner Chris Chibnall was planning The Power of the Doctor, Jodie Whittaker's final episode, which features a tear-jerking scene showing past companions meeting up to chat about their adventures. Naturally, he gave Langford a call – and she jumped at the chance.

"At that point I thought, 'Well, I wonder what Mel would be,'" she reflects. "A lot calmer. A lot calmer, and much more into her computers, yet very discreet about the work that she does.

"She had such a loyalty to the Doctor. It was really great that I had been able to still be in touch with [Mel], to think, 'I wonder where she's been and what she's done, and how she has kept her connection with the Doctor.' So then when I came to do it in the new TV series, it felt really comfortable to be with her."

With Russell T Davies returning to Doctor Who for the 60th anniversary series and Ncuti Gatwa's run, he also invited Langford back, first to take part in the specials and then as a regular for seasons 14 and 15.

Now, Langford says, it was time to do right by Mel.

"I'm really honoured that he thought Mel was worth bringing back, and that she got totally and utterly involved with the bi-generation," she reflects. "It was a thrill. I was very taken with the fact that I was able to correct all those mistakes that I felt I had made first time round and, for Mel's sake, that she was able to return as a much more rounded character with vulnerabilities."

Langford adds: "One of the things I loved about coming back as Mel as well was being in a different place for myself in my own life. When I first went into the show, everything had to be nice, it had to be pretty, it had to be nice outfits and looking good and all that sort of thing.

"When I came back and Russell wrote [Empire of Death], where I had to have all the prosthetics on, if that had been first-time Mel, I would have balked at that... I was just so pleased that Mel had that whole storyline of her realising that she was being taken over by Sutekh and trying to fight it, and then the scene before, where she was trying to communicate as much of herself as possible to the Doctor.

"I loved all that, and I would never have embraced that in the '80s. I was really grateful for that opportunity to turn her around, and also to have turned myself around as an actor, to have embraced something like that."

Now, fans are looking to the future after The Reality War, Ncuti Gatwa's final episode, which saw the departing Doctor regenerate into returning star Billie Piper in a shock twist.

"It was quite different to how we had filmed it," Langford explains. "We'd filmed it the year before, and I had to pop back and do some extra filming, which I couldn't do with everybody else, which I was really disappointed about. I was in America at the time, and but I was really, really grateful that they included Mel being busy somewhere else."

"Ncuti is a darling," she adds. "He has such charisma. He walks onto a set and there is joy and laughter and presence. He's such a sweetheart, and he had a lot on his plate. It was very intensive.

"We had a long time to shoot, and it was very technical, a lot of it, but we would laugh a lot. I don't think he had any idea what he was letting himself in for. Nobody does, particularly these days, when there's such a lot riding on it.

"It comes with such a history and a legacy, and that can be a burden as well as a joy. There has to be that element of eccentricity, of genius mind, which also has a darkness... I think it's a wonderful job to take on, but it comes with a certain amount of responsibility and irresponsibility to be able to wear that cloak."

Next up, Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw will lead the six-episode spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea, with various returning Doctor Who stars already being confirmed to appear.

When asked if she'll be making an appearance, Langford refuses to answer, saying: "I can't tell you. I can't tell you anything. I'm sworn to secrecy on everything."

Looking back at her career so far, Langford ultimately seems very grateful – for the experiences she's had, and the people she shared them with. Thinking back to her early days on stage, she recalls her bond with the late Dame Angela Lansbury, who she performed with on Broadway, in the 1974 revival of Gypsy.

"She had a great impact on me, on how to behave, and I would look up to her and emulate her. She was a very genuine, wonderful actress, but also a wonderful human being, and that had a very, very important impact on me," Langford recalls.

She hasn't forgotten the tough times – but is conscious actors nowadays might have it even tougher: "I'm quite glad that I wasn't part of what is now social media immediacy and the way that people can communicate with you very quickly and, sometimes, being in that veil of anonymity, can say things that can be very hurtful.

"I felt that I had a certain amount of protection. Funny enough, seeing boxes of publicity from my mother's collection, it was quite a tough transition [from child star to adult actress]. It was quite a tough world, and I think I chose to ignore a lot of it. But I loved doing what I did. I loved the job, and that kept me going."

As for any words of advice for actresses – particularly Doctor Who companions – who might follow in her footsteps? Rather aptly, Langford's words are simply a perfect mantra for life in general.

"Embrace it, enjoy it and find your version. There is no right or wrong."

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