For many readers of this site Deborah Watling will be best remembered as Victoria Waterfield, one time companion to Patrick Troughton’s Doctor Who. However her career didn’t quite start or stop there as her new autobiography Daddy’s Girl, co-written with Paul W. T. Ballard, will attest. The book contains sixteen pages of black and white pictures.

This is a deeply person account of her journey not only through her professional life but also through her personal interaction with the significant people in her life, not least of these was her father Jack Watling, who was at one time a very successful film actor. He even popped up in two of her Doctor Who stories.

Because of her brief time on the show the Who related lore is confined to a single chapter, but this does not make the reading any less interesting. Like most actors, Watling had her ups and downs and seemed, for a while, to suffer the curse of appearing in a successful show - typecasting can be a killer for your career.

Watling details her career as it spanned the wartime show Danger UBX and the lightweight films she made with David Essex and Cliff Richard as well as her pre-Doctor Who role in The Invisible Man, The Power Game and Out of the Unknown. But overall the thing which shines through is the deep affection that Watling had for her father and his influence on her life.

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Charles Packer