Sophie's World pt.2

Doctor Who's 'Ace'. The 10th Anniversary of the London Exhibition, continued

November 23rd this year marks the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, and our exhibition in 2013 marked the 50th. Here’s the second Sophie’s World post featuring photos from the exhibition and others that I’d scanned, but weren’t shown at the time.

Here’s Sophie Aldred on the exhibition opening night, with the photograph I named Bid Time Return, as a nod to the novel by Richard Matheson. To see this photograph in full, check out the previous post and see if you can spot the Tardis.

The above photo was taken on set during the filming of The Curse of Fenric, and is one of my favourite set photos. It was always tricky shooting inside with low lighting, and trying not to get in the way of the film crew in those pre-digital days. The film I found best for those situations was Ilford XP1, which was the only black & white film on the market that could be developed using the C-41 (colour film) process, and was extremely good in low light. This meant I could get my films processed much faster, using the lab just a short walk away from the Doctor Who magazine office at Marvel UK, in Bayswater.

Shooting outside was a much easier challenge and I tended to use Fujichrome transparency film. Here’s a fun shot of Sylvester and Sophie on set for the 1988 episode, Remembrance of the Daleks, in the playground of St John's School in Hammersmith, which doubled for Coal Hill School, featured in the very first Doctor Who episode, An Unearthly Child.

Another example of Sophie and Sylvester’s amazing rapport is the photo above, taken next to Centre Point on Tottenham Court Road, London, (1989 I think). We’d all just been to a screening of one of the Who episodes, and luckily I’d taken my trusty Nikon FM2 along with me.

In August 1991, I created the fictitious Megapolitan cover for the back of the Judge Dredd Megazine, featuring one of my portraits of Sophie, and with cover lines written by the editor, David Bishop, who was a bit of a Doctor Who fan himself… so that was an easy pitch! As these were pre-digital times, I printed the portrait in black & white and hand-tinted Sophie’s eyes and lips. The cover-lines and star in the ‘O’ were printed silver.

The Megapolitan was published, but there were also a couple of variant homages to my favourite magazines, i-D and Vogue that I wanted to follow-up with. This never came to pass, until I was preparing for the Sophie’s World exhibition and I discovered the rough designs for them after all those years.

I decided to recreate them as they were originally intended, using the photos I’d taken of Sophie at the time, and the original analogue typesetting galleys that I still had in the back of my plan chest. With the help of ex-Tharg John Tomlinson who created the very snappy cover lines, I had these printed up for the exhibition.

Also, for some time travel shenanigans, I bought an old copy of Radio Times from eBay, and carefully added my own front cover image to it, then mounted it in a picture frame.

From April 1966, I present Radio Times, Wales Edition.

Below is another shot we took in Crystal Palace’s own ‘Jurassic Park’, 1989.

Audio: Ben Eshmade interviews Sophie Aldred

On my original Secret Oranges blog, I regularly posted Ben Eshmade's terrific Arctic Circle and Barbican podcasts, so I was very pleased when he offered to interview Sophie at the exhibition signing. Above is a photo I took while Ben and Sophie chatted 'backstage' at Orbital Comics. Hit the play button for audio of the interview itself.

Above is the photo that Sophie mentioned in the interview as being one of her favourites, and below is one of my own.

And last but not least, Sophie Aldred & Sylvester McCoy, East London, 1989. The odd thing about this particular photo session, was that I took a little walk before the shoot, and crossed over a horrible rusty iron bridge, and consequently discovered an interesting old church. Little did I know that four years later I’d be living in that very building, since unbeknown to me at the time it had been converted for habitation. The whole area looked a bit like a demilitarized zone at the time, but the East End had a charm all of its own. Anyway, I went off at a bit of a tangent there, but… I like tangents.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this series, feel free to comment.

Doctor Who © BBC

All Photos © 2023 Steve Cook

As a request from LauraEmily in the comments here, I’m adding the Bid Time Return photograph, which is also available as a print signed by Sophie from her own website on www.sophiealdred.com