Bonnie Langford interview: ‘Doctor Who in the 1980s was all terribly serious – I was awful in it’

Bonnie Langford doesn’t just appear in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, Cameron Mackintosh’s West End jukebox tribute to the great American lyricist and composer. She steals the show – which, among a knock-out cast that also includes Broadway stalwart Bernadette Peters and Disney star Lea Salonga, is no mean feat. Indeed, Langford brings such personal, battle-­hardened defiance to her rendition of “I’m Still Here” from 1971’s Follies (opening line: “Good times and bum times, / I’ve seen them all and, my dear, / I’m still here…”) that the archetypal showbiz-survivor’s anthem comes across like a heartfelt confession.

“I do feel that that song is auto­biographical,” Langford tells me when we meet over coffee down the road from the Gielgud Theatre. She even warned Matthew Bourne, who co-directs the show with Julia McKenzie, that, “I can’t go too near it, because I’d want to cry.”

The version Langford sings on stage includes the updated lyrics – “Ten years of braces, voice and tap / Touring in places off the map” – added especially by Sondheim for Shirley MacLaine to sing in the 1990 film Postcards from the Edge. “My god, I’ve toured in ‘places off the map’,” says Langford. “And I’m not one of those people who can perform anywhere. I can’t bear touring somewhere that isn’t nice. There have been crummy times…”

Now aged 59, with half a century of performances under her belt, Langford has suffered her share of disappointments, yet on she goes. “Yes, there have been times when I was disenchanted,” she admits, “but I never wanted to quit.”

Langford first leapt to attention in 1971, as a six-year-old on the television talent show Opportunity Knocks, singing On the Good Ship Lollipop. Six years later – via stints in a London stage musical based on Gone with the Wind, then in the West End and on Broadway opposite Angela Lansbury in Sondheim’s Gypsy – she was playing Violet Elizabeth Bott in the ITV adaptation of Richmal Crompton’s Just William. The ringletted brat’s lisping refrain “I’ll scream and scream until I’m sick” helped cement Langford in the public consciousness as a precocious showbiz poppet; an image she has never entirely shrugged off in the decades since.

In truth, she says now, “I was a very quiet kid, not the type who’d get up at a party and sing and dance.” Although she denies that she was ever “pushed” into the limelight, her mother, Babette, ran a dance school – and still now, at 93, leads a school for young wannabes in Teddington.

“Her shows are incredible and horrendous in equal measure,” says Langford. “I love her to bits, but there are times when you go ‘This is too much!’” Does she see herself taking the reins one day? “Oh no, I know my place,” she says. “I was told off once because I didn’t have a plain black T-shirt to wear backstage. Even now, my mother would say I am no good at anything, though she really enjoyed the Sondheim.” She suspects Babette had always ­harboured her own ambitions of a career in showbusiness “but maybe because of the war she didn’t get the opportunities I got”.

With those opportunities came knocks. Seldom has Langford attracted the degree of contempt shown to her by Noël Coward in 1972 – who quipped about her contribution to that Gone with the Wind musical: “Two things should be cut: the second act and the child’s throat” – but condescension has hung around her, nonetheless, her spirit of plucky dedication at times viewed as an actorly limitation.

Although keen to bury the image of “Bubbly Bonnie Langford”, she recognises that she’s still a “people-pleaser” – and chastises herself for “falling back on old tricks”. With time, though, she says, she has got better at being honest. “If the doors didn’t open in the way they could have done, that’s maybe because I presented in a certain way. As we grow older, we can peel away the layers, be more our real selves. And if people don’t like that, well, you can’t please everyone. The good part about people having preconceived ideas about you is that you can blow them out of the water – and that’s the best feeling ever.” As she comes full circle with Sondheim’s work, half a century after her “life-changing” early experience playing the extrovert starlet Baby June in his Gypsy, that is exactly what she’s doing: getting the last laugh – and the respect she deserves.

Langford is about to complete another loop in her career, returning to Doctor Who, opposite Ncuti Gatwa’s 15th Doctor, as Melanie Bush, the companion she first played alongside the sixth and seventh Doctors, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, in two lacklustre series not long before the show was axed in 1989. This time, the omens are good. In contrast to the fluff of her much-loved, lithe-limbed appearances on Dancing on Ice and The Masked Dancer, Langford’s ­performance in EastEnders, as ­Carmel Kazemi, a mother shattered by the loss of two young sons, one to knife crime, was gritty and raw. So moving – and at points harrowing – was her portrayal that it won her a British Soap Best Newcomer award.

While we can expect Langford to bring some of her characteristic lightness of touch to the new Doctor Who, her older, wiser Mel will be a universe away from the innocuous, and shrilly irksome, sidekick she played the last time round. Back then, she says, “I felt like I was Fay Wray to King Kong. I was just there to scream and go ‘But, Doctor…’ ”

Russell T Davies, who is returning as showrunner to give the new Doctor Who a shot in the arm, sent Langford a script out of the blue after the pair had collaborated on an audio recording of an old, previously unmade Colin Baker story­line. “Russell said, ‘Do you want to do this?’” recalls Langford. “I said: ‘Try stopping me!’” In the new series, she says, her Mel will no  longer be a two-dimensional figure: “She’s supposed to be a computer programmer, but in the 1980s, she never went anywhere near a computer. I didn’t even touch the Tardis console. She now really knows her tech – which is a major acting job for me, because I can find it hard to text!”

What’s more, the character, who will re-enter the series in the new year, now has a fully developed backstory – something else that was missing from her original incarnation. “What I can say is that Mel has gone through a tough time,” Langford reveals. “Something dreadful happened to her and her family, and there’s a darkness she has had to deal with. But she valued her time with the Doctor, and still has that immense connection with him in all his forms.”

Langford lights up when discussing Gatwa (whose principal companion will be played by Millie Gibson). “We connected immediately, I don’t know why or how. He has a phenomenal freshness about him.” With depressing inevitability, the casting of Gatwa, the first non-white actor to take the lead role, has already been held up by a certain disgruntled Whovian minority as further proof that this historic show is being invaded by “woke think”. Langford laughs it off: “People have always said that there were ideological messages [in Doctor Who],” she says. “Look, every­thing has to be relatable, and if more people feel represented, that’s great – it’s about opening the doors and letting everyone in.”

In any case, it certainly feels like another make-or-break moment for the series, after ratings slipped (and critical complaints rose) throughout Jodie Whittaker’s tenure in the Tardis. Langford points out that, this time, the powers that be seem to be backing their new star to the hilt – dispelling the overwhelming gloom she recalls from her days on the beleaguered show alongside Colin Baker in 1986.

“I had worked with him before, and he seemed very easy-going, but this was a different, stressed Colin,” she says. It certainly didn’t help that Michael Grade, then BBC One controller, had it in for the show. “He wanted it off. He thought it was naff.” The result, says Langford, was that the Doctor Who set became infested with an absurd earnestness. “I remember doing a run-through of [my episodes of] The Trial of a Time Lord, and we were given the producers’ notes, changing this, that and the other. It was all terribly serious. It was supposed to be a family entertainment, but it was deep and heavy.”

Baker was dropped and, after completing one further series, with McCoy – the final “classic era” Doctor – Langford quit the show; not out of pique, she insists, but simply because no one had bothered to ask her to stay. “I had agreed to do two series, and when it was coming to the end of the second series, I made sure I had another job to go to.” Was she surprised when Doctor Who was axed soon after her departure? “Not really,” she says. “It was in a sad place then.”

Back in the day, few people had a kind word to say about her performance as Mel – and Langford doesn’t blame them in the least. “I’m thankful there wasn’t social media at that time,” she says. “I was awful in it. I’m so glad to be able to come back to it.”

As she darts off into the Soho ­twilight to prepare for curtain-up, I ask which moment she’d revisit if she could time-travel through her life. “Back to the opening night of Gypsy on Broadway,” she says at once. What about alien life, does she believe we’re not alone? “Oh, gosh,” comes the reply. “We can’t be the only little creatures in the universe. But, hey, I’m just an actor: tell me where to stand!”

Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends is at the Gielgud Theatre, London W1 (sondheimoldfriends.com), until Jan 6; Doctor Who will return to BBC One next Saturday at 6.30pm

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