Sadly, Lalla's career trajectory is typical of so many of her fellow Who-girl stalwarts; akin to a wagon rolling down a hill and smashing into a wall - with the rickety stone that turned its trajectory doom-wards being a certain 'seemed like a good job at the time' TV show.

The biggest credit one can award to Lady Sarah was that she was so versatile that she in no way used her aristocratic background and hereditary peerage to influence the acting roles she won. Thus she played roles as diverse as down-and-out characters called things like "Lady Augusta" and "Tessa Carmichael" to Princess Elizabeth and our own noble Time Lady Romana. In fact, had a law been passed to restrict documentary and film-makers to using royalty and people of title as subjects, she could quite possibly have kept working all her life simply by being very noble.

Alas, after the decidedly dodgy "Schoolgirl Chums", which may or may not be the role which demanded her to present the credentials of her "lips" in a court of law, she gave up acting completely, married disabled scientist Stephen Hawking and did some painting.

That was, until she was rather depressingly lured back to Doctor Who with "Dimensions in Time" in 1993, where she was forced to wrap herself in a curtain and sit in a garage talking to Ross Kemp.

She remains unfortunately absent from our TV screens today, despite hopes that she might have popped up in Brookside when Mary Tamm left.