We got measured a lot at THE PEGGY SHARPE STAGE SCHOOL. You put your heels against the ladybird, and felt Mrs Buck place her hand on the crown of your head. New pupils straightened their backs and stretched out their necks, like tender green saplings reaching up towards the sun, expecting to be rewarded by an approving gaze, but meeting instead, with the perplexing sensation of downward pressure. There would be an intense silence in the agency as the measurement was taken. Sometimes a second opinion would be called for. And sometimes Mrs Buck’s hand would press down so firmly, you could feel your neck compress and your spine buckle, like a tiny spring being crammed back into a ballpoint. The first time it happened to me, I looked at the carpet as I moved away and was surprised I hadn’t left an indentation. Because in the world of child acting, small is beautiful, small is cute, small is longevity.

It was just something we grew up with. Like Noddy’s little yellow car, Fireball XL5, or Stingray, we didn’t question Mrs Buck’s need to keep us small anymore than we wondered why Captain Troy Tempest had big black strings attached to his body parts. Only when the adolescent spirit descended, with a yearning for tangible proof that we were making the transition from child to adult, only then did the not unreasonable expectation arise that we might, at some point, reach five foot in height. And only then, with the arrival of a first trainer bra, double A cup, and a standby packet of Dr Whites proudly stashed at the back of the knicker drawer, did it begin to grate that at school we sometimes came up as much as an inch and a half shorter than we did when measured at home. Yet no matter how firmly we planted our feet on the carpet and imagined ourselves to be mighty oaks, four foot eleven held us in a vice. Something was awry with that height ruler. Was the big red ladybird purely for decoration or was it hiding something? The first five inches for instance?

Joan Buck was a good looking blonde from Hounslow, whose husband Maurice was Something Big in the Iselworth Yacht club. Blessed with high cheekbones, a dazzling smile and a drawly way of speaking, she reminded me of a fuzzy black and white film star from Sunday afternoon TV. My mother described her as statuesque. My father agreed that her ample shoulders appeared to have been carved from rock, perhaps, he added, designed for the purpose of carrying a substantial mink coat. The tousled Marilyn Monroe waves were sometimes sleekly caught in a bob at the nape of the neck, and held in place by a large ready made black velvet bow from Boots the chemist. It was a demure look, at odds perhaps with the voluptuousness of her bosom and the half-tinted diamante encrusted film star specs.

The daughter Michelle, herself no stranger to thirty volume peroxide, was a professional ice skater of some skill. Not the Olympian once predicted by the Acton Gazette but happily touring in Jack and the Beanstalk on Ice. The story was that soon after Michelle first went off on tour, Joan, used to many years of getting up at 5am in order to get her daughter to a private skating lesson on an empty rink, woke one morning at the customary time and was already downstairs pouring two bowls of Frosties before realising that her diary was a blank. And there and then she had decided to revive the buzz of the ice rink years by becoming a child’s theatrical agent at her friend Peggy Sharpe’s dancing school.

 Mrs Buck knew how to charm both men and women, a skill which Miss Sharpe, never had the motivation to master. Miss Sharpe was at heart a dancing teacher with a church hall mentality and as such had an ear very much tuned to the sound a half crown made when rattled in a tin. Peggy’s horizons never stretched much beyond Hangar Lane, Joan however had her head turned toward Hollywood.

In our house there was no tooth fairy, no Santa Claus, my mother made it clear that the sleigh bells we could hear when my father asked us to close our eyes were no more than ha’pennies balanced on his knuckles and chinked together. But I never felt there was a hole in my imaginings, a vacancy for a mythical benefactor, because Mrs Buck stepped right into the gap, sat down in an armchair and made herself at home. And just as children continue to hold Santa Claus dear, long after he has been unmasked as a false prophet, so, whilst my friends made jokes at Mrs Buck’s attempts to hold them down, I loved her still. I knew that if you want to get on in showbiz you must be sure that your face, and in this case the rest of your body, fits.

Peggy and Joan, towered over my childhood casting glittering shadows. They shared the belief that in the market place, everything was permissible. Deception was the better part of valour. Joan prided herself on never saying no. She sat in her cramped, chaotic office, the twisty wires of her cream plastic telephones continually crossed, smiling like the Cheshire cat, her head in the clouds and her feet floating a good few inches above solid ground. She thrived on never telling anyone any more that was absolutely necessary, and never letting her roots show. The scams the two women dreamed up were themselves childlike, and compelling to the children in their care. An Aladdin's cave of delicious possibility was perpetually dangled before us. And what 10 year old could resist? Finding ourselves standing before a casting director with our heels against the ladybird, and feeling that familiar pressure on the top of your head, who in their right mind would not take their cue from Mrs Buck’s ‘Just a minute I don’t have the right glasses with me…’ and bend their knees just a tiny bit? It was St Trinian's, it was Fagin's gang, it was The Italian Job. And we were getting away with it.

We lived to work. At assembly, or in fact at any time during the day, everything stopped for the school secretary who would give out notes to those about to go out on auditions the following day. We guarded the tiny squares of paper, as though they had the power to foretell the future.

name........... JANICE

out at..........10.15am

back at ............1pm

Never did we know where we were going, who would be taking us, or whom we would meet when we got there. It was a top secret mission. Occasionally a clue, might be scrawled across the bottom wear white socks, or hair in bunches.

‘McDougals self raising flour, Heinz Baked Beans, Fairy soap…’ Our personal list of credits was engraved on our hearts in a way that, the date of the Battle of Hastings never would be. We recited them like times tables – ‘Persil, Robertsons jam, Birds Eye Fish Fingers …’ Mine read like a shelf in a corner shop. J Walter Thompsons an advertising company near Bond Street was my favourite destination on account of the pile of American Key Comics in the reception. There, on buttoned leather sofas, we lived out the THUMPS THWACKS KABOOMS of Spiderman, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, while we waited to be seen. There was also JACKIE with the sophisticated Sterndorf School for Spies that my mother wouldn’t let me read at home.

‘Mars bars, Prudential Life Insurance…’

After about ten items the casting director cut in, ‘Ever done an advert for crisps of any kind?’

‘No…But’

‘But what?’ Her interrogation sounded desperate.

‘I’ve done one for jelly-tots. Does that count?’

She heaved a weary sigh. ‘Mike, does Jelly-tots count?’

‘Yeh. It’s all confectionary.’

‘Sorry darling. Thank you for coming in.’

Drat. Foiled again. Stopped in under a minute. Will keep Jelly tots under my hat in future.

Whilst being small was always desirable, it was also extremely helpful to always be the right age at the right time. For practical and legal reasons, this could sometimes be quite complicated. Exactly what we were legally allowed to do, at what age, where, and for how long, were technical details only Miss Sharpe and Mrs Buck really knew, and they preferred not to burden us. We seldom saw a contract or a license.

So before leaving for an interview we tapped at the door of the agency to ask ‘How old am I?’ It was like perpetually plunging your fist into the great tombola of life and always coming out with something different. Joan consulted the diary. Feeling for the spectacles perching on her bosom, at the end of a shiny chain, she gave us a cursory look up and down, made a rough calculation in her head and gave her pronouncement.

As the Underground rattled toward Tottenham Court Road, we’d show off by repeating our personal mantras ‘I‘m twelve I‘m twelve I am twelve’, quizzing each other on, our newly adjusted dates of birth, the relative ages of our brothers and sisters, and finally our star signs. You had to be on the ball. But with so few of our brain cells being taken up with tiresome academic material, it wasn’t hard to stay ahead of the game.

And that was how I came to be working at the BBC on an episode of DOCTOR WHO in 1968. At the time a child under the age of twelve was not allowed to work inside a TV studio. I was nine going on ten. I lied about my age. I was acting under orders. I was.

I don’t know whether my parents were fully aware of my crime. ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive’ was a saying my grandmother quoted a lot. It might have been embroidered on my cot pillow, had my mother been able to sew. I had been brought up with the idea that Divine protection comes to those who tell the truth.

Strange, that the DR WHO story I happened to be engaged on, called The Mind Robber, centred on a question of what was real and what was imagined. The Doctor’s adversary conjured up a number of apparitions, characters from fairy tales, myths and legends, to terrify each of the Doctor’s young assistants. To escape the Mind Robber’s spell you had to face up to the demons, confronting the apparitions with the words ‘YOU DON’T EXIST IT’S NOT TRUE’ whereupon they evaporated into thin air.

My part was ‘Second Girl, one of a group of children in turn of the century costumes who had to torment the Doctor with old nursery rhymes. As the only girl in the school who sounded as though she came from anywhere other than a council estate, I’d been sent along to the audition as a last resort.

Being nine years old, trying to keep up the pretence of being twelve, amongst a group of teenage boys could, admittedly, only be counted at the lower end of the scale of childhood trauma, but it was daunting nonetheless. The boys were loud, their voices were breaking, they smoked. They were small but they were scary.

Then there was the chaperone. Instead of the doddery old dear with a handbag full of colouring books and malteasers that I was used to, we were given a young woman wearing false eyelashes and a baker boy hat. She wore a skinny rib sweater through which you could see the lumpy bits of her bra straps, a check miniskirt with a wide belt that joggled when she walked and skin tight shiny plastic boots which gripped her powerful calves in a frightening way. She was the only woman I’d come across on whom the stocking-tights I longed to wear myself did not wrinkle at the knee, so sturdy were her legs I remember Miss Smith, being mildly irritated with me for not falling in with the boys, though I did not realise at the time that this was because she wanted to be free to flirt with the actors. I stuck to her like glue.

Rehearsals took place in a church hall off Ladbroke Grove. Though I lived round the corner, in every other way I was a traveller in a strange land. A traveller in time just like the Doctor.I had never been in a rehearsal room. I didn’t know what rehearsing was. The first thing I saw was a network of the variously coloured tape stuck on the floor.

‘What’s that ?’ I asked Freddy Foot. Two classes above me, and aptly named, 15 years old but tiny.

‘Duh…It’s the way they mark out different bits of the set Dumbo. We’re on the green.’ To a child already obsessed with not treading on the cracks of the pavement, a floor covered in strips of tape was a cause for great anxiety. Making an entrance without treading on the wrong line was like playing hopscotch.

There was a blue police box in the corner of the room. Here I was on firmer ground. I knew that TARDIS, stood for Time And Relative Dimension In Space and that if you stepped inside you could travel backwards or forwards in time. And I knew that the TARDIS was dangerously unpredictable. Many times I’d seen the Doctor aiming for an intergalactic destination in pursuit of the Daleks only to be transported to somewhere entirely else. Of course I understood that it was only pretend. But still it crossed my mind that if I could only step inside for a second I might be able to start it up and zap forwards a couple of years, emerging as a mature sophisticated twelve year old wearing nail polish, smoking a cigarette and swapping banter with the lads.

The Doctor, was a craggy man with heavy dark hair and eyebrows, friendly, if louder than I was expecting. A boy with smooth skin and an account at a the local bookmaker played Jamie the doctor’s male travelling companion in a kilt, but he wore trousers in the rehearsal room. Dr Who’s assistant Zoe, an exceptionally pretty girl with a pageboy bob, and dimples.

My favourite feature of the programme was the TARDIS’s concealed wardrobe, which contained a never ending supply of space age outfits for Zoe to wear. A skin-tight Lurex catsuit or a micro mini skirt and gold boots.

Though I idolised Zoe, the Doctor and Jamie’s tremendous affection for her came as a great surprise to me. We were not a tactile family at home. Zoe was mauled, squeezed, her pert bottom patted, and generally groped, continually, especially when she was trying to be serious. And she seemed happy, took it in her stride, week after week along with having to look scared by a succession of overweight actors dressed as beings from other galaxies in saggy all-in-one catsuits which showed the line of their y-fronts. To Zoe, the endless Wellingtons sprayed silver, the alien facemasks improvised, by a resourceful costume department out of an egg box, a length of plastic tubing and a drinking straw, were as water off a duck’s back.

But unlike Zoe, who no one took seriously, everyone seemed to expect slightly more from me than I was able to deliver. Getting my line ‘How many beans make five?’ in at all before the boys rushed on to the next one was a challenge in itself.

The programme was recorded at the BBC CENTRE. I’d seen the lights of the BBC building many times. As the tube train trundled out from the tunnel on the approach to White Citystation, daylight and the illuminated letters BBC broke through at the same moment. It was a landmark, the West London equivalent of the HOLLYWOOD sign.

My friends had told me that there was an old ghost station lost somewhere between White City and Shepherds Bush. It was thought to have been called Wood Lane. Part Grimm’s fairy tale, part Quatermass Experiment, a picture of a deserted woodland had begun to develop in my imagination. A place where children could disappear, never to be heard of again. It was rumoured that if you looked hard enough as the train went through the tunnel you could glimpse the abandoned platform. Though I tried many times I never saw it. From this doomed place, I imagined, the White Cityhad been born, a Spanishy arrangement of identical whitewashed houses dominated by a huge Taj Mahal of a BBC. A place where people were dressed in flowing white robes, and lived ordered lives of spotless whiteness. A place where nothing ever went wrong.

As we approached on foot, I was disappointed to find, the White City was more of a grey. The main building was circular, like the space station in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Office windows looked out onto a round flower bed in the middle, where, at the top of a column, stood a gold statue of a naked athlete balancing on a ball. There was a road running round the outside of the building, leading I presumed to the Blue Peter Garden.

Three ladies, looking like the Beverley sisters, sat, boxed-in by a big desk in reception. Their set hair and neat skirt suits were all that stood between us, and the nerve centre of British Broadcasting. I recognised the one on the end as an old girl from Peggy Sharpe’s. Lorraine Johnson, who’d had the misfortune to be born a tall girl in a family of much smaller ones, her sister had been the original Gretl in the Sound of Music and at twenty one was still starring in a BBC family sitcom about an eight year old, whereas Lorraine of above average height had fared less well. She didn’t remember me. I had to repeat my name several times.

‘With a name like that you’ll have to be a Star’ she said in a manner not entirely complimentary ‘You’ll be either that, or a Nobody.’

I felt a wedge lodge between my ribs; the idea that if you are not a star, then you must, by default, be nobody; that the territory in-between is worthless, that a race is only worth running if you are certain to win. Peggy Sharpe herself was not big on the middle ground. Neither were my parents. What I wondered, is star quality exactly? Is it Look? Is it Gift? Or is it a trick, like being able to play the William Tell overture on your teeth?

I’d only just got used to the rehearsal room and now here I was, in the TV studio. Standing on a set consisting of gigantic polystyrene blocks, Alice, in a stickie out pinafore, broderie anglaise leggings, and a towelling dressing gown with the letters B B C stamped on the back. No sign of the director now, a man wearing headphones barked instructions to a row of studio cameras, which looked worryingly like Daleks lumbering around on gigantic bases. I was paralysed with fear. The boys, veterans, were soon skidding around the polished floors in their Norfolk jackets and knickerbockers joking with the camera men, doing pretend singing down the microphones.

My hair had been cut into an unorthodox shape by my mother, short in the front but long at the back, a style which was just baffling to most hairdressers. I was used to the style attracting comments. Stephanie Millburn said I looked like the boy from the Addams family, but now I was to discover a problem even more serious than that. My hair refused to go into ringlets. Or any kind of curl. The make up girl tried brush rollers, plastic rollers, foam rollers, setting lotion, setting gel, and Elnett satin extra strength hairspray, but though the short front frizzed up nicely, within 5 minutes the long back had dropped dead straight.

‘Look at this Sylvia. What are we going to do?’ was as the cry.

A much larger woman from the other end of the room reached up to an overhead cupboard and produced a brand new box of Carmen heated rollers. The juniors gasped in wonder as if they’d never seen them before. She applied a copious amount of green slime from a tub marked extra firm hold, stuffed my head full of the carmens, and shoved me under a hairdryer. I felt really special.

I was occupying the best chair, and rather enjoying the novelty of being stone deaf from the noise of the dryer, when two human size tin soldiers in cardboard suits crashed in to the make-up room apparently finding it difficult to breathe. Once released from their cardboard casings, two young actors I’d hardly noticed in the rehearsal room the week before, telling stories round the tea urn, were now transformed by virtue of their bare torsos, white breeches and riding boots. Though I couldn’t hear a word, I could feel even under the hairdryer, the surge of excitement in the room. Make up girls flocked around dipping chamois leathers into 4711 Cologne to mop the sweaty brows and other parts.

My chair would have to be vacated. One of the girls was deputed to extricate and deposit me elsewhere. As we left the studio I caught a fleeting glimpse of Miss Smith with a third tin soldier apparently giving him a neck massage.

Immediately outside the studio door was the tea bar. Actors wearing hair nets were drinking coffee from polystyrene cups. Beyond that, the circular corridor seemed to wind on to infinity.As you walked endlessly on,the only clue to pinpointing your whereabouts was that the colours of the tags on the doors changed from red to green to blue. I thought if you were colour blind you could go on walking round and round for eternity, never arriving at your destination. But I had my make-up girl as a guide.

Down a staircase we found an empty room with a couple of basins, but no sign of a hairdryer.

‘Shit,’ said the girl as she rattled various locked cupboard doors. ‘I’ll have to take you round to blue.’

The weight of the Carmens had made me slightly top heavy and as we skirted the corridor created a roller coaster effect. Eventually we found a suitable room. My girl sat me in the chair, pulled the plastic hood over my head, put a large control switch on my lap and said:

‘The hotter the better. If you can’t stand it, turn it down. I’ll be back in half an hour.’

I wasn’t sure how long half an hour actually was or if I’d ever been left on my own for as long as that before. There was a clock on the wall. I watched the second hand ticking away. There were no magazines, not so much as a copy of The Topper to look at. I wondered what Nick Kelly and his assistant Cedric might have done in my position, guarding the important secret about my age, whilst an unexpectedly troublesome haircut threatened to bring down the entire production. The deafening noise and excruciating heat of the dryer wore away at my resilience. I tried to wriggle out, but it was impossible due the large number of curlers making my head enormous. The switch was very stiff. A couple of times I turned it down to MED. Mostly I kept it on HOT. The clock ticked on…