Back to Salford for another gig in the same venue, staying in the same hotel as last week. As I passed the kettle and tea and coffee and UHT milk tonight I had a sudden flashback to Shredded Wheat in a cup. And I wondered if I was stuck in a Groundhog Day and whether the tour would ever actually end. It feels enough like that anyway.
In the interval I was keen to find out if York City were beating the cheating, thuggish scum of Luton Town and was amused to discover that the Luton manager had been sent off for fighting. That's the kind of people you're dealing with in Luton. I was pleased to see that York had got a goal and so are still clinging on to our play-off hopes. But as I browsed Twitter before returning to the show I saw the horrible and shocking news that Elisabeth Sladen had died. Sarah-Jane Smith was not the first Dr Who assistant that I remember. I had already fallen in love with the gorgeous Jo Grant, even though I can only have been 4 or 5 at that time, but when Jo left (hopefully climbing through a window to leave so we could see her bum), Sarah-Jane arrived, less overtly sexy than Jo, but pretty and smart and feisty. I loved her in a pure way. I didn't want to see her climbing through a window. She was more than that, showing the tiny Richard Herring what he should be aiming for in a potential partner. Bums in windows were all fine and good for the short term, but Sarah-Jane was a woman you could grow old with.
I was delighted in recent years to see her again, both in a return to Dr Who and in her own series and to note that she was still just as gorgeous as she had ever been, because her beauty would not fade with age, because it was about who she was rather than how she looked. But she also looked hot. And not like someone who was about to die.
This is one of those deaths that I am sure affected a vast swathe of the population in the same way. Like our hearts had been dug out with a spoon. Disbelief and sadness and the loss of something important and tangible from our lives, that until that moment we hadn't ever really thought about how much it meant to us. RIP Sarah-Jane.
I had to dispel my sadness and go back on stage and do the show.
But we've lost two icons from my childhood this week, Mr Lucas from Are You Being Served, and Sarah-Jane from Dr Who. I loved the former as a child, though turned against him perhaps as I got older and more judgemental about my comedy, but I never turned against Sarah-Jane. Suddenly we are reminded of our own mortality and of our own aging. Those seventies TV stars are leaving us. Which makes me realise that it won't be long before people who were on TV in the nineties start dropping off the perch regularly. Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.
