The bus conductor regarded them coolly.
''Where have you been? On the moon?''
Ian grinned. ''No, but you're getting warm.''
Barbara prodded him in the arm. ''Shh,'' she said,
and then started laughing.
Ian laughed with her.
After all their time with the Doctor, they were home.
The important thing about Ian and Barbara as traditional heroes
when the series starts is that the Doctor isn't.
The Doctor is a strange, weird, rascally amoral character,
and we don't know what to make of him.
Ian and Barbara have a very important role in being the moral centre.
In the entire time that they're in Doctor Who,
we never have cause to question them.
The Doctor, he'll land them somewhere, have no idea where they are,
will get himself caught up in something or get them locked out of the ship,
and they're the ones who have to sort it out.
Jackie Hill and Billy Russell were the most professional
and the most lovable people I think I have ever worked with.
When the TARDIS opened, those people had to come out
and immediately go on some sort of childish exploration.
They were able to assume a simplicity of manner
without being simple themselves.
What's important about Ian and Barbara
is they teach the Doctor to have responsibility.
He's a man who spends his time gadding around having a nice time.
Whenever anything gets difficult, he runs away to his spaceship
and goes to somewhere else. They make him a better person.
And everything that follows in Doctor Who is as a result of their influence.
Barbara, at her best, is the Aztecs.
From start to finish, that's her story.
She is magnificent in it.
The Doctor gives his reasons why they mustn't get involved,
why they can't change history, not one line.
One last appeal.
What you are trying to do is utterly impossible.
I know. Believe me.
I know!
And Barbara says no to him and then says,
I'm a god.
Not Barbara.
You're Tarksa.
She wasn't the sort of person who you felt, er...
you could dismiss at all.
The moment in The Edge Of Destruction where Barbara rounds on the Doctor
and says, you should be on your knees in gratitude to us.
It is the first time that either Ian or Barbara
actually put their foot down and say, stop.
How dare you!
Do you realise, you stupid old man,
that you'd have died in the Cave Of Skulls
if Ian hadn't made fire for you?
Barbara's at her best when she tells the Doctor no.
HE COUGHS
There's only a few more feet, Doctor.
She's coughing and struggling with somebody and they're being gassed
and she's pulling him along and then they pass out
and then she gets him up and it's very like Jackie,
that she sort of suddenly says,
now, come on, we're going to do it.
And then, boom! You know? It's marvellous.
In The Dalek Invasion Of Earth,
Barbara gives the history lesson to the Daleks and is making it up.
As in the case of the Indian Mutiny, which I'm sure...
Indian Mutiny? We are the masters of India.
I was talking about Red Indians.
And what's great about that is we know she's a history teacher
and it rewards anybody who knows the bits of history
that she's talking about.
General Lee and the 5th Cavalry are already forming up
to attack from the north side of the crater.
The second wave, Hannibal's forces,
will of course come in from the southern Alps.
The third wave... Attention! Attention!
Is Barbara using what's at her disposal to defeat the Daleks
or battle the Daleks and confuse them?
I was, you would say, the...
..the dashing action man.
That was my sort of little niche, but I did do other things.
Ian's also a traditional hero
because he's the one that does the fighting.
Whenever there's a call for fighting to be done,
Ian can do that stuff.
My two favourite bits of Ian Chesterton's character,
I think one is in the Daleks where he tells the Tharls
that they must stand up and fight.
So there is something you'll fight for?
He is the one who will unite the rebels
and they will fight the monsters.
It's where he's not like that,
where things become much more interesting,
where he lets his hair down.
And I think my favourite example of that
is when he's dancing in the chase,
because it's completely unlike the Ian we know.
It comes out of left field completely.
We know that he likes his pop music from the very first episode
and he knows about John Smith and the common men,
but Ian dancing like an embarrassing dad
is a side of him we've never seen before.
I sometimes have to watch an episode with my children,
but it's always a painful business for me
because they're mocking me so much.
It lasts about ten minutes,
and scream and laugh and everything.
Oh, look at that wall wobbling! Dad!
I think they have a grudging respect for it, you know.
BELL RINGS
Jacqueline and William Russell were very reliable actors
and they probably saved the day quite a number of times
when William Hartnell would go off script.
You'll end up as a couple of burnt cinders
flying around in bins in space!
They were very supportive of Bill Hartnell,
who, by the end of The Chase,
didn't know whether he was chased or chasing.
He was a very tired man and he was already beginning,
beginning to show signs of the illness
that would kill him, unfortunately.
He knew the overall pattern.
He knew where he had to be and what he had to do.
Sometimes he would fluff his way through the text.
Yes, but I don't understand where the light comes from.
Oh, I think that might be just some fluorescent substance
in the walls.
Pest!
But Bill and Jackie were able to support him
and never make him look foolish.
And they did that with consummate love
and they did it all the way through.
But one would always help the other actor
if you could see that he was just a little bit unsure.
All that would obviously add to the tension,
because, as I say, we were doing it without any stops.
We were going from start to finish like a live show.
And if anything did go wrong, if somebody forgot lines,
you had to quickly look and see where they were picking up.
Up there in the gallery, you were sweating blood,
and when an actor goes wrong, and Billy went wrong so often,
and you're very quietly and beautifully,
your PA to your left would say,
he's off text, I don't know what's happening, he's off text,
you're on camera three, and you'd just pray.
What else could you do?
Hm, astonishing.
In all my travels, I've never come across anything like this before.
However, Susan wasn't harmed anyway.
She was a bit frightened at losing her shoes,
but she's gone back to the ship for another pair.
Yes, and if you'd had your shoes on, my boy,
you could have lent her hers.
You mustn't get sloppy in your habits, you know.
And the astonishing thing is that Jackie and Bill came to his rescue.
If they had not so done, we would not have got Doctor Who recorded.
And they stayed like that right the way through to the end.
I think at the end, they were quite glad to go.
They'd had enough.
I've always found it difficult to stay in the same job
longer than about...
I've never managed two years, but...
It is very difficult, I find.
I want to move on all the time, so I want to change.
But that's it by nature.
Writing out Ian and Barbara...
..was, I think, somewhat long overdue.
They all, by that time, had felt that they'd done their stint.
So, although there was a certain nostalgia,
we all felt a sense of déjà vu
every time we came to those last studios,
that we were battling against odds and not always winning.
And that's never a nice feeling.
And I think both of them felt enough is enough.
I was quite relieved when Jackie said,
I'm thinking about it too.
And then we had to face Bill.
Would the Doctor take us?
Let's ask him.
I thought Bill would be upset and cross.
He was.
HE LAUGHS
And he would be, you know, he wouldn't understand.
HE LAUGHS
And the scene that takes place at the end of the chase,
when he really gets angry...
How dare you, young man? How dare you, sir?
And you can see he is very angry and very disappointed.
That was very much like what happened.
He couldn't understand.
You know, he said things like,
I don't understand you, he said.
You know, here we are, we've got a wonderful job,
a great chief, everything's going well.
Why do you want to leave it?
You know, it was difficult to explain to him
that I felt, you know, I had other things to do
in the theatre and life and everything,
and I wanted to get on.
And I thought I'd devoted enough time
to being a swashbuckling action man.
Verity was very understanding about things.
She was about to leave herself.
And she was going, and I was going, and Jackie was going,
and, you know, one felt it was a sort of change
that was going to happen.
When Susan leaves, the next episode,
they introduce Susan's surrogate, which is Vicky.
When Ian and Barbara leave, there's a very different change,
because they don't need to replace them as moral characters.
They don't need that moral purpose,
because that's what the Doctor has now become.
He is the one taking the fight to the monsters.
BELL RINGS
Ian?
Do you realise we could get home?
The section at the end, she just turns and says,
I think I'd like to go home.
Asks me if I would, and I hadn't thought about it,
but I think I would, yes, I'd like to go home.
And so it was done very deftly, I thought.
It's so lightly done.
I mean, it's not made it to great drama.
Dougie Camfield did all that still stuff in Trafalgar Square
and riding on the buses.
We had a very enjoyable time doing it.
I think one of the successful things about The Chase
was the stills we shot at the end,
when their rejoicing was totally natural, unconfined,
and you saw them back in the real world,
and able maybe to pursue a more serious theatrical path.
BELL RINGS
I don't think that they were in love.
I think they were very fond of each other.
But I didn't ever envisage them marrying myself,
and I'm sure Jackie didn't either.
There was a feeling of regret and of sorrow
mixed with an enormous release from them,
and of me too, because after that I went off and did other things,
you know, and that was time for us all to leave.
Find your pet!
So did I.
I don't think I feel ever,
when the last curtain comes down and everything like that,
that there is a great regret.
All these things were fun and good in the time that I did them,
but I never felt,
oh, how awful to be going. I didn't feel like that about it, no.
I shall miss them.
Yes, I shall miss them.
Silly old fusspots.
Come along, my dear, it's time we rode off.
They walked down the street, smiling, laughing and holding hands.
There are fewer men wearing ties, said Barbara, and the skirts are shorter,
grinned Ian.
It's different.
The doctor said it would be, said Ian.
Come on, she said, there's somebody waiting for us.
They stopped outside a simple, unremarkable house,
and Barbara squeezed his hand.
She rang the bell.
After a moment, a small, elderly woman opened the door.
She peered up at them and her mouth fell open.
Barbara scooped the woman up in her arms.
Ian stood back, giving them space.
After a long time, the women withdrew,
both holding on to each other, both weeping with joy.
The old woman regarded Ian,
and he could see Barbara's face in her features.
You're the one who took her from me, she said.
Mum, said Barbara, this is Ian.
He's brought me home.