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Doctor Who: Bonnie Langford on Chibnall, Davies Doing Right by Mel

Bonnie Langford knew Mel Bush wasn't treated well on Doctor Who until Chris Chibnall and Russell T Davies brought her back and redeemed her.

Bonnie Langford was too scared of Doctor Who as a child, so she hadn't watched it when she was cast as companion Melanie "Mel" Bush by producer John Nathan-Turner in the 1980s. By then, Langford was a known musical theatre and TV actress in the UK. Mel was a companion to the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) and Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), a health nut and computer programmer who never touched a computer throughout her run in the 1980s.

"I just went into the show very blindly," shared Langford during a conversation with Radio Times. "I enjoyed it tremendously. I had a good time doing it. But, were I to take it on now, I would probably focus on it slightly differently. I had no idea of the impact. It was interesting as well, because most of the time, people who played the assistants it was very early on in their careers, and certainly in their TV careers. So it was unusual to have a companion who had a profile. But at that point, the show was going through a lot of difficulty. John adored it and was fighting for its survival, and I have a feeling that I was brought into it because I was getting a lot of column inches at that time with publicity, and he knew that it would have an impact on that side of it."

Bonnie Langford Agrees: Mel Wasn't That Great in The '80s

Langford now shares the sentiment of many fans who think her performance was not that great: "I was just far too perky, far too big a performance… I think it was far too bouncy. Mel was very irritating." Mel was subject to the usual sexist trope of having the companion scream and be the damsel in distress. And when she decided to leave, the producer and writers didn't even bother thinking about writing an exit for her until Sylvester McCoy insisted she got one.

"Yeah, they hadn't really accommodated at the end of the series that there would be a leaving!" Langford noted. "Sylv said, 'We need a better scene,' so they came up with this new scene. I think I made it a bit schmaltzy, actually, myself, but it was fine. I would have done that differently now as well, but it was nice to at least have some kind of completion. But it did seem funny that she went off with Sabalom Glitz on a shopping ship!"

"I agreed to do it for two years. I didn't expect to stay. I didn't feel very proud of what I was doing. I had another job to go to, and that was that," she said. However, more than twenty years later, with the revived series, thanks to the current showrunners, nothing ever really ends, especially not for companions who were done dirty.

Chris Chibnall and Russell T Davies Brought Mel Back, Did Right by Her

In 2021, then-showrunner Chris Chibnall  called Langford to offer her a cameo at the end of Jodie Whittaker's final story, "The Power of the Doctor." "At that point I thought, 'Well, I wonder what Mel would be,'" Langford said. "A lot calmer. A lot calmer, and much more into her computers, yet very discreet about the work that she does. She had such a loyalty to the Doctor. It was really great that I had been able to still be in touch with Mel, to think, 'I wonder where she's been and what she's done, and how she has kept her connection with the Doctor.' So then when I came to do it in the new TV series, it felt really comfortable to be with her."

Then Russell T Davies returned as showrunner in 2023 and brought her back to Doctor Who for the 60th anniversary specials and Ncuti Gatwa's two seasons as the Fifteenth Doctor for Disney+. "I'm really honoured that he thought Mel was worth bringing back, and that she got totally and utterly involved with the bi-generation," Langford explained. "It was a thrill. I was very taken with the fact that I was able to correct all those mistakes that I felt I had made first time round and, for Mel's sake, that she was able to return as a much more rounded character with vulnerabilities."

How Modern "Doctor Who" Redeemed Mel Bush

The Disney+ era of Doctor Who established that Mel has been working for U.N.I.T. as their resident computer security expert, which brought her reunion with the Doctor. And she was finally seen working away on computers! "One of the things I loved about coming back as Mel as well was being in a different place for myself in my own life. When I first went into the show, everything had to be nice, it had to be pretty, it had to be nice outfits and looking good and all that sort of thing.

"When I came back and Russell wrote "Empire of Death", where I had to have all the prosthetics on, if that had been first-time Mel, I would have balked at that… I was just so pleased that Mel had that whole storyline of her realising that she was being taken over by Sutekh and trying to fight it, and then the scene before, where she was trying to communicate as much of herself as possible to the Doctor. I loved all that, and I would never have embraced that in the '80s. I was really grateful for that opportunity to turn her around, and also to have turned myself around as an actor, to have embraced something like that."

Langford has also confirmed that she shot scenes for the finale episode "The Reality War", Gatwa's final episode, which saw the departing Doctor regenerate into returning star Billie Piper in a shock twist. "It was quite different to how we had filmed it," Langford explains. "We'd filmed it the year before, and I had to pop back and do some extra filming, which I couldn't do with everybody else, which I was really disappointed about. I was in America at the time, but I was really, really grateful that they included Mel being busy somewhere else."

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