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nwhyte's review
3.0
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3249736.html
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.
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.
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