Doctor Who: Remembering The First Doctor's Companions

2. Dorothea "Dodo" Chaplet (1966)

Alas, poor Dodo. Saddled with a silly nickname, paper-thin characterisation and a legacy that€™s spotty at best due to so many of her episodes being missing. She literally stumbled into the TARDIS at the end of one story (The Massacre of St Bartholomew€™s Eve) and just sort of wandered off in the middle of another (The War Machines), never to be seen again. The character was a young Cockney girl... at least at first, anyway. Almost immediately the BBC told the production team to change the character€™s accent to a more €œproper€ one, and that, really, was the beginning of the end for the character. It€™s hard to pinpoint exactly why Dodo was so unpopular. Maybe it was that she, like Clara, is something of a non-entity. She€™s not a bad character, per se. There just isn€™t much there. Or maybe it's just that, after so many years of at least one teenage girl being aboard the TARDIS, the audiences had just had enough. Either way, the Doctor Who fandom can all agree that Jackie Lane, the actress who played Dodo, was very hard done by. Her contract ran out in the middle of filming The War Machines and, rather than just paying her for two more episodes so that they could give the character a decent departure, they just sent her packing instead. It's not much of a surprise, then, that out of all the living old series companion actors, she remains the only one who has never worked with Big Finish...