Anita Dobson suspects you get more fearless as you get older. “You should do, shouldn’t you?” she says conspiratorially. “The third time they asked me to do Strictly,” she continues, by way of explanation, “my best friend said to me, ‘You love dancing. Why do you keep saying no?’ I said, ‘I suppose I’m a bit scared of making a fool of myself.’ And she said, ‘At 62, do you care?’ And in that moment, I realised I didn’t.”
Fearlessness features in Never Too Late, the first of 5’s reinvention of Play for Today, the classic series of one-off plays broadcast on the BBC from 1970 to 1984. Dobson plays Cynthia, a sprightly senior citizen who, after one too many funny turns, is packed off to a retirement village by her daughter (Tracy-Ann Oberman). This institutional life ill-fits free-spirit Cyn and soon she’s protesting about rules and regulations – and quite possibly railing against the distant but encroaching dying of the light.
“After I read it, I rang them straightaway and said, ‘Yes, definitely. 100 per cent.’ I was gung-ho to get on board,” Dobson enthuses, “especially as it was giving people opportunities who might not otherwise get them.” Like the other Plays for Today (see page 23), Never Too Late was commissioned by 5 with the express intention of championing new behind-the-scenes talent. A laudable ambition that, upon watching the Plays, you wish 5 had believed in a bit more and invested just a bit more budget. “We did it on a shoestring, in a ridiculously short amount of time and I was in every scene but one. But I thought, ‘You’re here for the duration. Get up early, get on set, do your job, set an example.’” And you can bet she did.
Still, the augurs were there. The young Anita was a member of the Ivy Travers Dance Troupe and, at four, she was so enchanted by a pantomime at the Hackney Empire that “my grandfather said, ‘She’s got sawdust in her blood.’ ” Later, she learnt to tap-dance, entered talent competitions when they went on holidays and became a juvenile coat model for C&A. “I always thought I should have been a magician’s assistant. Being on show, looking fabulous, I would have gone down a storm.”
At school however, there was very little of the arts apart from “staring at a wringer for what felt like an eternity in Mr Dubowski’s art class in an effort to put it onto canvas”. Dobson left with few qualifications, and got her first job at the Prudential Assurance Company – “It was like being buried alive.”
It was there, at an am-dram group run by the Inner London Education Authority, that Dobson made another bold choice: to go with the group to Czechoslovakia on an exchange programme. It was the summer of 1968, Dobson was 19 and ready to perform a new piece of theatre about life in the East End – Oi! The Musical.
“Me and my friend Brenda went off on a coach to Prague, which was the first time out of the country without my family,” Dobson recalls. “We got to where we were to be staying in this youth hostel on Wenceslas Square. And the first thing that happened? The Russians invaded. We woke up the next day and outside, the Square was full of tanks. All the way round, with boys around my age sitting in them, with guns. That’s when it hit us that this was an invasion and we were in the middle of it.”
When the villagers found out they were actors, they asked them to perform their show. So every night, after curfew, Dobson, Brenda and the rest of the troupe gave the villagers their Oi! The reception was rapturous. “This adoring fan club gave us rings, jewellery, boots… they insisted because we had performed for them. When we left, when all aliens were ordered out of the country, it was…” Dobson tails off as she wells up. There’s a beat of a sombre silence. Then, she says, breezily, “So that was my baptism of fire as far as acting is concerned!”
“Early on, I remember I had a scene on my own on the pub stairs with Roly the dog. I sat talking to him about my marriage, my life, my demons. I was stroking the dog and I started to cry. And I couldn’t stop, so I just went with it. I finished the scene and Roly didn’t move, and I didn’t move, and the whole set was silent. And I thought, ‘I’ve found her.’ Because inside that jolly, mad, awright darlin’ and the make-up and the hair and all that, there was this broken doll.”
With highs like that, it would have been easy to stay, to still be there today, perhaps. But Dobson was done. “By the time I got to EastEnders I was 35 or 36 and I remember thinking that the next train was leaving soon and I needed to get on that if I wanted to make, learn and do lots of different things.”
This openness that led Dobson to another decision – to take what she thought at the time was a bit part in Doctor Who. It was only later that she, and the viewers, would discover that the nosy neighbour Mrs Flood was actually the Rani. A Time Lady originally played by Kate O’Mara and one of the Doctor’s most formidable foes, the role was “a fantastic gift”.
The last we saw of Dobson’s Rani, she eluded the Doctor’s grasp after her plan for galactic domination failed. Would she return to Doctor Who? “Anything is possible. And if Russell asked me now, I’d be out that door so quick.”
And she’s had that experience. “I can’t put that crown on again and scream my tits off for 12 shows a week for five weeks,” she sighs. “It’s unseemly, isn’t it? And it’s just too exhausting for a 76-year-old woman.” Fearlessness can take a person places. Up a beanstalk isn’t one of them.
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Big Winners
Written by Martha Watson Allpress
Sue Johnston and Paul Copley star as Edith and Arthur Thistle whose frugal 53-year marriage is rocked by a £14m lottery win. While he intends to spend, she has other plans. Plans that don’t involve Arthur — because Edith wants a divorce. It’s a story about opportunities seized and missed, chances taken and squandered, lives lived and paths not taken.
Special Measures
Written by Lee Thompson
Amy, the deputy head of English in an overwhelmed and underfunded Liverpool school, is already having a bad day when her boss resigns. Then comes the announcement that Ofsted inspectors are arriving for a surprise appraisal. As Amy is caught between burnout and bureaucracy, the school’s future hangs in the balance.
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