Chris Pocock as The 5th Doctor
I played the 5th Doctor in Doctor Who - TRIDENT, as portrayed by Peter Davison in the tv series. When we sat down and decided who we were going to be I thought that I'd watch a couple of the episodes to get myself in the picture. Unfortunately, I realized that there wasn't much to latch onto - he doesn't do a lot of overriding factors really, so on the first day of filming I decided that I would just play the character as me.
Originally I thought we would get Lynne (Lynne Heaney - Selby) to play a character in very very early on talks as one of the original companions like Nyssa or somebody and then when we got slightly more into it we were worried about whether she was actually going to do it or not, so we decided to write her out and put in a character that could be male or could be female, so if she could do it that wouldn't be a problem, but we could have her in it if she still wanted to, so that's how we created the character of Selby rather than a proper companion. So where my companions are I have no idea!
We built the console quite a long time before it was used for filming, the basic idea being that it would be a three sided one, shot from the front to try and trick people into thinking that it had six sides. In reality it never got finished till minutes before we used it, so we used it in its demolished state for Craigs (Craig Hurley - 7th Doctor) episode which entailed giving it a quick coat of paint, shoving tonnes of wires round it and it was done. However, for Johns (John Walker - 6th Doctor) and my stuff it needed to be the proper console, in the console room so the night before and, as I said, the minutes leading up to filming we were there, putting new buttons on, re-painting, making sure it looked good, including the fact that we had put fairy lights in the console, which had a few cracks in it, so they were blatantly showing out, so while everyone else was rehearsing for my episode, I had to put all these black bin-liners inside the console. We had other stuff happening to the console, like in Johns first scene he ripped half the console off but I think the most annoying part was that each scene had to be timed so that the lightsabres inside the console wouldn't turn off while filming.
My costume - I love it, but the first time Craig saw it he whispered - "Here comes the Janitor!" so now I can't look at it without laughing.
Working with all the different people was really strange. We decided to give the companions a more up-beat influence over the story. So the girls were people who didn't scream, didn't twist their ankles, that sort of thing and our male companion turned into the more bumbling sort of weirdo, causing problems.