Space Girl: Maureen O'Brien on her time as Vicki in the classic Doctor Who

Nov. 21, 2023

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Maureen O’Brien had no desire to star in Doctor Who. She was already perfectly happy performing at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, thank you very much. “It didn’t sound like much cop. I wasn’t interested,” she tells SFX. Indeed, she had little interest in television, full stop. “We didn’t have a television in the house when I was a kid. It just meant nothing. The only thing that mattered to me was theatre. That was where my life was going to be. I didn’t take television seriously at all.”

Nevertheless, she was encouraged to apply for the role of Vicki by her teacher at the Central School of Speech and Drama. A reluctant audition for producer Verity Lambert followed, and she was offered the job. O’Brien accepted for one reason: she’d be closer to her London-based partner, Michael. Unfortunately, a darker side to her newfound fame soon revealed itself. “Suddenly I had journalists calling me, camped outside, banging on the window and shouting, talking to the neighbors – ‘Have you ever seen her, what does she look like?’. Michael and I were crouched on the floor, curtains drawn, these monsters outside.

“It was traumatic. I have never known anything like it. I thought, ‘What’s happening, what have I done?’” She hadn’t set foot inside the studio. “It gave me a horror of publicity from that moment on. I didn’t like being famous in that way.”

Her first episode aired to 10.1 million viewers and the actress found herself facing unwanted attention and harassment. “I was just appalled by it. I went through a period when I could do nothing but cry, all the time. It was a breakdown. It was such a shock. We’re all the same, and [fame] kind of removes you into this ‘other’. It was frightening. I didn’t like it.” This was only the beginning of O’Brien’s complicated, you might say, relationship with Doctor Who.

New Faces

Fortunately, happier times lay ahead, thanks in no small part to the relationships she developed with her new “family”, including William Hartnell, who was a year into his tenure as the Doctor. “I was aware of nothing but welcome,” she says of their first encounter, “but he probably reserved judgment until he could see whether I could do it or not. He was rather touched by how seriously I took the acting. He was just incredibly nice to me. He loved his fellow actors.”

What was her co-star like on set? “He was difficult,” she says, resolutely. “He was irascible. He was everything that’s terrible.” Hartnell was prone to a temper, she divulges, and could flare up several times a day. “Spitting, vicious teeth, with rage!” She gesticulates, vividly. “He would say terrible things about people.” O’Brien took on the role of mediator, laughing him out of his rages. Despite this, she remembers him as “a lovely man, and a wonderful actor. We were friends from the very beginning. He was very fond of me, and I was fond of him.”

O’Brien recalls one particular hair-raising encounter with the series’ creator, Sydney Newman. “He said to me, ‘How would you like to cut your hair short and dye it dark?’ I said, ‘I’m going to change my hairstyle when I leave Doctor Who, not when I’m in it!’ It was no secret that I wasn’t happy. He said, ‘I thought it would be more of a stronger image.’ I said, ‘If you want short, dark hair, why don’t you just get Carole Ann Ford back?’ He laughed, and that was it. I went on set.”

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In one of Doctor Who’s most audacious adventures, “The Web Planet”, a colony of weird and wonderful insects menace the TARDIS, its crew, and Riverside Studios’ cameras. O’Brien smiles upon recalling the story’s ant-like aliens, the Zarbi. “They were wonderful. When they reared up, there was no feeling that there was an actor inside them, they just seemed like the real thing. They were huge. I can remember one of them coming up to me when I was standing at the side of the set. He towered over me, and I was back up against the wall. They were threatening. I was really scared.” Yet the story is still one of O’Brien’s favorites. “It was a brilliant conception. It had a real philosophy, and it was ambitious. Very ambitious.”

What does she recall of the robot Chumblies from “Galaxy 4”? “I loved the actors who were inside them,” she beams. “They were played by little people. I felt we had a lot in common! They were talked to as though they were children. They were not only grown-up but middle-aged, even elderly, but they were being talked to as though they were children. I thought it was bizarre. How can they do this? But there it was…”

Of primary concern to O’Brien was Vicki’s characterization. The writers, she says, had no idea what girls of 15 were really like. “I was a Liverpool kid, and Liverpool kids are very bright and funny and skeptical, but I just wandered about saying, ‘Oh Doctor, what is it? Oh Doctor, I’m so frightened!’ “I decided, because she seemed to be so dim, and,” – she lowers her voice – “boring, that the only way I could get away with this ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ was to play her very young. I thought she was unnaturally young and innocent for her age, and that’s the way I played her. That’s why I did this awfully innocent, little girl voice. That’s the only way I thought I could make it work.

“Watching an episode recently,” she adds, “I’m quite a bolshy, teenage rebel in it and I thought that was clever of me, to start creeping it in. I looked at it and thought, ‘Good for you, girl. You’ve got some real life in there.’ I wasn’t content to play it on one level like that, as a simple girl.”

O’Brien, understandably, shied well away from the Doctor Who convention scene, only attending the occasional signing, years apart. But she has found herself dipping her toe into fandom’s waters over the past year. “I don’t mind anymore,” she says, adding that she’s pleased her character is so fondly remembered. “I’m glad to make people happy.”

Having had a brief taste of playing Vicki once again, would she be up for reprising the role on television in aDoctor Who spin-off? “Yes, I’d love that! If anyone ever offered it to me, of course I would! I used to say no a lot. I never say no now. I just want to work. It would be lovely.” O’Brien isn’t overly familiar with her storylines, but she admits to being impressed by what she sees, when she thinks of the paucity of the means. “What was achieved with so little, with cardboard and glue and imagination,” she says. “The imagination of the designer, the writer, and the audience.” She likens her Doctor Who episodes to the theatre, considering them “more immediate, more improvisatory”, and much more primitive compared to programs recorded today. “Everything had to be done by hand, as it were. You couldn’t get these marvelous special effects that you can do now. It was all do it yourself.”

SFX broaches the fact that, after countless other stage and screen performances over the years, O’Brien is described in the biography of her latest novel as “best known for her role of Vicki in Doctor Who”. She grimaces. “Oh, I know, don’t even speak of it! I accept it, but for many years I really was bitter about it, because I did some wonderful stuff, and it’s all gone, except the only thing I’m remembered for, which was an aberration for me. I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for, for the rest of my life! One little job in 1965…”

Nevertheless, O’Brien will always hold a special place in Who history. She effectively trialed what was to become a great British institution: the revolving door system of the Doctor Who companion. Vicki’s entrance through the TARDIS doors marked the very first time the audience was one step ahead – they already knew what magical wonders lay beyond them. Viewers instantly took to the 25th-century orphan, and O’Brien’s legacy remains in full force to this day.

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