Louise Jameson disproves the theory that former Doctor Who companions never work again. With a list of TV credits that includes regular parts in The Omega Factor, Tenko, Bergerac, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, and Rides plus a successful stage career she has proved that hard work pays off. But to Cult TV fans she will always be Leela, the savage who played Eliza Doolittle to Tom Baker's Henry Higgins in a string of classic stories.

How did you become an actor?
I always knew I would. It ís genetic, I suppose. I am not sure how it happened. It's just like the facts of life - I always knew. When I was four I played Little Miss Muffet at primary school and adored it. I got a huge round of applause and a lot of giggling and I just loved the feedback from the audience. At one point I wanted to be a Tiller Girl. You're probably too young to remember those. It was the London Palladium. You know those girls that all dressed identically and had very long legs and who would stand in a long line with feathers sprouting out of their bums. They used to kick their legs very high. I wanted to be one of those for a while. Then I wanted to be a concert pianist. In my teens I had to choose between that and becoming an actress. I had to focus in on one or the other because they are both so time consuming. So the piano went and Shakespeare took over.

What was your first job?
The very first job I did was Cider With Rosie for BBC1. It went out on Christmas Day 1971.

Apparently you were up for The New Avengers?
Yeah, well, they said I got down to the last ten but I think they probably told half the profession they got down to the last ten. All the world and his mother. It was down to me, Joanna Lumley and at least half a dozen others. I wouldn't have minded Ab Fab. If I was to have her career... I would love a job like that.

How did you get the part in Doctor Who?
They saw sixty for that. Then cut it down to five, and then down to three and then down to me. I went in and met Pennant Roberts (ed: the director of The Face of Evil), and I was short listed. I had just had a holiday in Jordan so I was looking very brown. So, although they wanted a white girl, they wanted somebody dark skinned. If I had auditioned in the middle of the Winter I wouldnít have stood such a good chance.

Was it your first regular television part?
No, I'd done Emmerdale Farm, only six episodes though, and I'd done a couple of children's series, Tom Brown's School Days and Roy Dominic's.

For most of the actresses who played companions, Doctor Who was one of their first jobs after leaving college...
I'd done two and a half years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. I went to RADA very young. I went in at 17, which is unusual. I was terribly lucky. I came out at 19 ready to go whereas most people don't start their training for another year. The competition wasn't that heavy until about Doctor Who time.

While you were in Doctor Who it was at the centre of a debate on violence on television. Was this something that you were conscious of?
Not really. Tom (Baker) was terribly conscious of it and loathed the fact that Leela had a certain amount of muscle. He hated the Janis thorns, they were originally called Janice thorns but he said it sounded like an out of work actress. So we had to change it to Janis thorns. It was he that instigated getting rid of those, and quite rightly. He thought, well why don't you just use them in every situation. It was like the sonic screwdriver, you had to put in a line like "even the sonic screwdriver won't get me out of this one". It was just another one of those types of things.

The level of violence seem to be reduced while you were in Doctor Who...
The one before I came in, Mary Whitehouse had really done a big number on - the one which Tom did on his own (ed: The Deadly Assassin). There had been a complaint and they had had to cut out some of one cliffhanger because the complaint was upheld. I think they were just on their toes a bit.

Tom Baker said in an interview that he thought that you were one of his favourite companions because of the way you had thought through Leelaís alien aspects. Was that something you worked very hard to rationalise?
That was nice of him. Yes, this is something I do no matter what the part. I don't think actors are trained up now in the same way. I think if you've done two and a half years at the Royal Shakespeare Company where the text is picked over in minute detail with the best experts in the world. I didn't consider my training finished when I left RADA. I still feel I'm learning, and I go to the odd workshop. I don't think that you can be detailed enough, especially when the scripts aren't that hot on relationships and objectives. I think Tom Baker was one of the best Doctors, he was a really talented man.

He was apparently bored and frustrated about playing the Doctor while you were in it. He was even talking about leaving. Was this something that showed?
No, he was very dedicated to the part. He got very frustrated sometimes. He is really intelligent, really intelligent. He has a very, very high IQ and if he was dealing with people who didn't quite match that, he wasn't always the most tolerant person. His love and care and dedication to the programme never faltered, never failed. He really, really did work very hard at it and I think when he felt people weren't matching that he got frustrated.

When Graham Williams took over there seemed to be a greater emphasis on special effects than there had been. Introducing K9 and the Chromakey (Chromakey is a system that allows actors or props to be superimposed on to models or drawings) work in Underworld were examples of this. Did you find that this made your job more difficult?
I hated Underworld, I hated it. We worked on this blue cloth and it was really, really difficult to maintain any kind of emotional truth. I actually thought it didn't look very good in the end. I think it was very, very poor quality. Special effects are what the fans seem to love so I think it was a learning curve. What the BBC seem to say is 'this programme is very successful, let's cut the budget', rather than 'let's put a bit more money in and make it even better'.

Is it difficult to reach the right emotional level on TV? In the theatre you are working continuously, but in TV there is a lot of waiting around involved...
There is a Stanislavski excercise called sense recall. There must be moments in your life where you can instantly recall the melancholy, or the anger, or the grief, and you just step into that for a second and then transfer it to whatever you're doing. It's called transference. That gets easier as you get older. It's just like exercising a muscle. I think it's why a lot of actors are a bit mixed up and a bit neurotic, because if they let go of their neurosis it would become less easy to do that. If you say, you know, let go of that anger Louise, in a way I don't want to because I want to keep it there and use it for my acting.

Some of the other actresses who have played companions have said they felt frustrated by the quality of the scripts. Was that a feeling you shared?
I think you'll find we all do. How many ways can you say 'what is it Doctor?' You run out of inspiration. Having said that, there were two or three stories I really liked. I loved The Sunmakers, that was my personal favourite, and my first one I thought was very well written, and I liked Talons of Weng Chiang, so I had three good stories.

You became something of a sex symbol because of Doctor Who. How did you feel about that?
I was really surprised, really surprised. I thought I was going into a kiddies' TV series. But, if you dress someone like they dressed me and put them on after the football results, if the telly's still on and there is a huge male population watching the box, I suppose it's inevitable really. I was very shocked, and I was rather sickened by the papparazis' interest. They weren't so bad when I was in Doctor Who, but about three or four years later when Tenko started. I got pregnant and I didnít want anyone to know who the father was and I had to get the police out to deal with The Daily Mirror. They just wouldn't take their finger off the doorbell. I found all that very invasive and rather horrible. It's hardly in the national interest, is it?

Why did you decide to leave Doctor Who?
I'd been offered Portia in The Merchant of Venice at the Bristol Old Vic. That was the biggest carrot. I was also shortlisted for a movie, which didn't happen, which was Yanks. I felt that careerwise, Doctor Who had done about as much it could do. And, as I say, I was rather depressed with saying 'what is it Doctor?'.

After you left Doctor Who you were in a series called The Omega Factor, which I have been unable to find out anything at all about?
It seems to have sunk without trace.

The only time it seems to get mentioned is in comparison with The X Files. Can you tell us a bit about that?
It compares more with Bill Baggs' BBV videos. It was a very good idea. It had George Gallaccio producing. What it was was three scientists, Jimmy Hazeldean, John Carlisle and myself, who ran a sort of paranormal investigative bureau with an umbrella story of one of us being a Russian spy. You didn't find out until the last episode that it was John Carlisle who was the spy. All the way through there were little red herrings to indicate that it would be one of us. Each episode was a story in itself. The mistake, in my mind, was that they got six different writers to write the first six episodes. They couldn't confer with each other at all. We as actors were left hauling these characters together. Something we had established in episode one would then be overturned in episode four. It was loose in that way. There wasn't enough preparation time put into it. I think as an idea it was absolutely terrific. We had one really spooky thing happen. The devil was supposed to enter Jimmy Hazeldean at one point. They were doing the special effect in the studio, putting the devil's features on top of Jimmy's, and he had to hold very still while they lined it up. Then there was a complete power cut in the studio and it was out for four and a half hours. Nobody ever knew why. It was particularly horrible and I thought 'I don't know what we're dealing with here'.

Of all the companions, you seem to have been the, well, maybe successful isn't the right word, but you seem to have had a higher profile than a lot of the other actresses who were in it. Why do you think this is?
I think successful is all right. You can say successful. I am very ambitious and I'm very hard working. Not to say the others aren't. I'd done all that classical theatre before I came to Doctor Who, so I had another branch to my acting career. I've been very careful to mix and match the media. I've never just stuck at telly or just stuck at theatre. I think the longest I've been off the stage is two years. Theatre is really my first love. And Bergerac was a real godsend, four years of keeping me up front.

How did you get involved with Bill Baggs' BBV videos?
Well, Bill just rang me up. Somebody dropped out at the eleventh hour. I never quite understood the politics of it. I'm nothing if not reliable, and they needed someone who could learn it overnight.

What did you think of those videos?
I think they're really good. I think they get better and better. The Devil of Winterborne is certainly the best.

Have you got plans to be in any more?
Well I do have. I am not sure how much of a secret this is. I think Bill wants to branch away from sci-fi. I think he will still do sci-fi, but he wants to do serious drama as well. We are looking at a script at the moment to put on film, which is fantastic. I hope that gets off the ground.

Louise Jameson, thank you very much.