Doctor Who legend Carole Ann Ford says BBC has a "duty to the fans" to continue show

Doctor Who's first ever companion has said the BBC has a "duty to the fans" to continue the show after recent discussions about its future following the end of the deal with Disney.

Carole Ann Ford, who reprised her role as Susan Foreman in the latest season of the show alongside Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor, has praised the loyalty of the fanbase.

"The fans are very loyal and they've stuck with it through thick and thin over the years," she exclusively told RadioTimes.com.

"And when the BBC weren't producing it, they were producing it themselves. There's a huge love out there [and] it'd be a shame to to squash that. I do think they have a duty to the fans to reproduce it, to carry it [on], to keep it going."

Ford's words echo those of former showrunner Steven Moffat, who also spoke to RadioTimes.com about the BBC's "national duty" to continue Doctor Who.

Thankfully, despite the deal ending with Disney, it seems the Beeb are very committed to Doctor Who, with chief content officer Kate Phillips assuring fans that the show will continue. Indeed it has since been confirmed that Russell T Davies will return to pen a new Christmas special this year.

Elsewhere during the in-depth chat, Ford looked back on her first memories on Doctor Who, starting with filming the first ever serial An Unearthly Child, which aired in 1963.

"It somehow cemented Susan within me," she recalled. "Strangely enough, I think, when I walked through the junkyard and saw the TARDIS, it was a feeling of home... By this time, I was very familiar with it, and it was Susan's home, and when I looked at it, I didn't see the outside, I saw the inside, which was much bigger!"

Meanwhile, she also reflected on how she and her co-star, the late William Hartnell, who played the First Doctor, would invent backstories for their characters, after they felt they hadn't been given enough information from the writers.

"Bill and I put our heads together and we made it up," she revealed. "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.

"Everybody was going crazy, and he just bundled me into the TARDIS and said, 'Right, we're out of here.' So we got in with only a partially-working TARDIS, which he continued to fiddle with throughout the series, and finished up where we finished up – Totter's Lane."

Carole Ann Ford's full interview will be available on RadioTimes.com soon.

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