Graham [Williams] just could not or would not take no for an answer, and although I did not know it at the time, he was in behind-the-scenes negotiations with Tom [Baker], too, who was asking for more control on the programme, and had even threatened to leave the show. Graham asked me if I would stay on if Tom was no longer involved, but my answer was still the same. He never gave up, though, and continued assuming I would change my mind until the very last studio day—talk about persistent!After reading First Generation, billed as Mary Tamm's autobiography, I wondered why she had stopped writing when she reached the middle of her time on Doctor Who; a friend pointed out to me that there is in fact a second volume, published in 2014 after her death in 2012, so I went and got it.
It starts very strongly, with The Androids of Tara, which Tamm identifies as her favourite of the six Who stories she was in, challenging her to act in four different roles (and as I noted in 2008, gorgeous in all of them). And she takes us through the higlights of her later career, in particular two linked series called The Treachery Game and The Assassination Run, which I must look out for. But then she goes oddly silent on her subsequent career; maybe she simply ran out of time, but it's a shame not to find out about her Blanche Ingram in the 1983 Jane Eyre, or her time on Brookside.
She does cover her experiences of motherhood, and of travel (mainly to Doctor Who conventions). It was very interesting to learn that she used the local National Childbirth Trust meetings to get source material for future performances by observing the other new mothers, the experience of pregnancy and birth being a great social leveller in its way. But unfortunately the book was never finished, and ends with a series of warm tributes to her from friends and colleagues (some referring to things we have not previously come across in the book). Still, it fills some of the gap left from the first volume, and you can get it here.
