Bedford Who Charity Con 10 took place on Saturday 5 April 2025 at King’s House Bedford, raising £16,145 for SMART, Bedford’s homelessness charity. Adam Kendrick reports with the first of four articles on the interview panels.

When Katy was a small and noisy girl, her eyesight was so poor that she was required to wear huge round glasses with thick lenses. She would flounder around the pitch while playing ball sports, not knowing which goal belonged to which side, and get into trouble with the teachers who assumed she was playing deliberately badly. Eventually, her gym mistress took pity and cast her as the lead in a school production of Alice in Wonderland so that she wouldn’t have to attend gym lessons. By the time she played Bashful in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, everyone seemed to know that she would eventually become an actor – or rather, everyone except for Katy herself; she believed that she would become either a dentist who designed bejewelled teeth, or a surgeon who sewed kneecaps back on. Years later, a thirteen-year-old Katy auditioned at Shepherd’s Bush for a bet, where she waited alongside lots of pretty girls while wearing her Thora Hird-style glasses and a duffle coat with a Ban the Bomb badge. When it was finally her turn, she took off her glasses and recited “The Lion and Albert” by Marriott Edgar in a deep Northern voice. Unfortunately, she didn’t pass the audition and it took a very long time before she made her television debut in Softly, Softly: Task Force (1970).

The following year, Katy was cast as Jo Grant, the Third Doctor’s newest companion, in Terror of the Autons (1971). Katy didn’t have much input into Jo’s outfit, but she personally wouldn’t have picked out the miniskirt and platform boots which were the height of fashion at the time, considering the amount of climbing and stunts that the role involved. Quite often, she would have to scale mountains and ride motorbikes with both pairs of eyelashes stuck together in the wind – as if her eyesight wasn’t already bad enough! Nevertheless, wearing such an impractical costume did provide a benefit; because she was wearing something that she would never wear normally, it helped her to get into character and she would be so immersed in the role that she didn’t concern herself with how she looked. She was, however, able to accessorise her costume with her own rings and did her own makeup and hair.

Katy had no problems with being typecast after she left Doctor Who in The Green Death (1973). One of her first roles afterwards was in Armchair Theatre’s The Golden Road (1973), the first lesbian court case portrayed on television, which was directed by former Doctor Who director, Douglas Camfield. Katy described Douglas as “just the most wonderful man” and went on to work with him while playing a junkie in Target (1977). She also presented her own daytime programme called Serendipity (1973) where she taught viewers how to make arts-and-crafts, before commuting by plane to the Edinburgh Fringe so that she could play a 16-year-old mass-murdering girl guide in Union Jack (and Bonzo) (1973).

Katy’s advice for budding actors is that you need to be completely dedicated to your career. Even when you’re out of work for years, you’ll always consider yourself to be an actor. There may be hundreds of people auditioning for the same role, so you need to be mentally prepared for rejection – so much so that whenever Katy does land a role, she’s often surprised and will ask, “Are you sure?” She recommends that you should be punctual, play around with your voice and find what accents you can do, and always have a song and dance under your belt for auditions. Most importantly of all, you need to live in the now. There’s no point lamenting the past or worrying about the future; instead, live between the N and the W of the word “NOW”.