Magic Bullet Productions

Jenna Stannis: The Teleport Queen

 

Alan Stevens talks to Sally Knyvette about Blake's 7, intensive farming, blowing up parliament and her favourite chalk pit.


This interview was originally intended for publication in the final, unpublished, issue of Scorpio Attack!, and is printed here with the permission of the zine's owner, Jonathan Helm.

Why did you take up acting?

Sally KnyvetteWhy did I take up acting? Goodness! I was running a French restaurant in the Kings Road. I'd lived in France and then Switzerland for nearly twelve years, and I came back to London with two French friends, who wanted to start a restaurant in Chelsea. We started it and it became very successful, and I realised that I could go down that route and be a restaurant owner. Then, one night, another friend of mine came into the restaurant and she was an actress, a woman called Tilly Tremayne, I don't know whether you have come across her, but she's a very good actress. She's married to an actor called Trevor Peacock. And I said, “oh, how fantastic to see you. What are you doing?” and she said, “I'm acting,” and I said, “Are you?” she said, “yes, you would love it!” And I suddenly started thinking about it a bit, and I went to meet her teacher, a wonderful woman called Beryl Cook, who only recently died aged 98, and I'd so enjoyed having private lessons with her, on a one to one basis, for nearly two years, that I realised that this would be a route that would really, really excite me. We did poetry exams, I started learning about Shakespeare, but I didn't go to proper drama school, as my family would have gone absolutely ballistic if they'd knowing I'd wanted to be an actress, so I was having to do all this in secret. I answered an advert in The Stage for a children's theatre company and my first job was doing Oscar Wilde fairytales in schools. Four shows a day for the enormous sum of thirteen pounds a week. That's how old I am. So, there you are. A long answer.

And a good answer. So your father wasn't keen on you joining the acting profession...

No. He was a doctor who lived in West Sussex, and he was very keen for me to be a diplomat's wife. And he wanted me to go to secretarial collage and do a bilingual secretarial course. Well, I started. I did about a month and I got thrown out.

Why was that?

Well, I was just too rebellious, and it bored me silly, and I seem to remember, I found out what the typing exam was.... and so my friend and I managed to type it up all perfectly, and put it under our typewriters, and as the exam came to an end we pulled out the good one and got caught cheating. So, that was the end of my secretarial career... I knew I'd never be a secretary.

So, really your father had quite a conservative future mapped out for you.

My father was a staunch Conservative. A very strong willed man, but he equally had a strong willed daughter. And we battled for many, many years. We ended up being very good friends, and he was very proud of the fact that I'd gone into acting... eventually, when I started doing well, but obviously, like a lot of parents he'd though, “oh, this is the road to... a road to...”

Prostitution?

Yes! [LAUGHS] So, he was amazed when things started going really well, and then was really fine about it all, and he came to meet my teacher, and he liked her very much, and he realised I was in good hands.

You did a lot of Shakespeare at first, on the stage.

I actually did seven years in rep. Rep hardly exists now, but it was all over... places like Farnham, Sheffield... goodness, Ipswich. I was there for three years. And there you would be doing a different show every two weeks. You'd always be rehearsing one, and playing another at night.

Good training ground, then?

Enormous. It's really how actors used to be trained, and some of my generation did train like that too. I mean, it was learning on the job in rep, and so I don't regret not going to drama school because I think you become very much your own person and you evolve in your own way, rather than having a particular RADA style.

I've heard that often, after drama school, you spend a lot of your time unlearning stuff you've learned.

Precisely, and I think, well, I've got this belief that you don't become a real “Luvvie” if you don't go to drama school. You just have to learn. It's a hard learning process. You learn very slowly, but surely. I made an awful lot of terrible mistakes when I was young, but I did love rep, and you'd wander around the country with your suitcase going from job to job. And it was a good seven years before I got Blake's 7 actually.

You did a few things for television before then, though, didn't you?

Yes I did. I did something called Who Pays the Ferryman.

Which I remember seeing.

Really? I saw a tape of it recently and I was truly dreadful in that, but it was the first telly I'd ever done, and it was with a lovely man, who's now no longer with us, called Patrick Magee, and I was playing his girlfriend in it. I was playing a wild junkie who was living up in the mountains of Greece with him, and he was on the run from the police. And I thought you would act on television exactly the same way you would act in the theatre, so my performance was way over the top. But it was fun to do and as a result of that David Maloney saw me working in the studio which led to Blake's 7. I'd also done a couple of Z Cars and things like that before, one or two small tellys.

But you never did a Crossroads.

I never did a Crossroads, but I'll tell you what I did do. I've just remembered, I did General Hospital, I was a nurse in General Hospital for about a year with Jane Howe and Robert Lindsay, who is now a big star. We were all nurses and porters together at Elstree. So I did some lovely bits and pieces in telly.

How then was the idea of doing Blake's 7 sold to you?

SK: I seem to remember I was just sort of brought in and asked if I'd be interested in appearing in this major Sci-fi series, Britain's answer to Star Wars, and I thought, “god!” That threw me. I have to be honest with you, I had never read a science fiction book in my life, but it did sound incredibly exciting. And they were being very careful about who they chose. I liked David Maloney enormously, and we subsequently met Ronnie Marsh who was Head of Series, and it seemed terribly exciting, you know, I was twenty-five, or -six, or something, and this seemed to be a really great and exciting opportunity.

Had you worked with any of the cast before?

No, I hadn't met any of them, I didn't know any of them, but we did get on incredibly well.

So what were you told about Jenna?

I was told that she was a feisty intergalactic space pirate. Who, I thought, would do all her own stunts, and that she would be very much in charge of the Liberator, and indeed, you know, it did look like that in the beginning. Jenna was the only person who knew how to drive the Liberator, she'd had been sent off to a penal colony. She was considered a smuggler and a dissident, so all of that really appealed to me, because I was pretty anarchic in my own temperament, and loved the idea of being a smuggler.

Later it was learned that she was being sent to the penal colony because she had been set up by the Mafia, which is even more interesting...

Yeah, absolutely. You know something, I had forgotten that.

She wouldn't smuggle drugs, so they set her up.

That's right. You're right, god, you remember more about it than I do. Well, yes, in those days, because I was very inexperienced in telly, I probably didn't take in enough of the backstory mentally. Now, as a much older actress, I teach a lot and I direct a lot, I realise how vital it is to get any tiny bit of information about your character and develop it all the time as you're acting, but in those days I was really working on instinct, rather than digging as deep as I might have done and should have done.

You were second billing on the cast list, after Gareth Thomas.

Yes. Again I had no idea what that meant, I had absolutely no idea, but yes, I was second billing. Which was very nice, and still is very nice.

Paul Darrow was under you.

Apparently so, yes, I think he may have noticed this [LAUGHS]. I wouldn't have had a clue about these sort of things. These sort of things didn't even... I wasn't at all concerned a what my status was, or how important it was, I was just enjoying the actual fact of being in a series like that.

There was this idea that Jenna kind of fancied Blake.

Well, there was, but as became clear, because we were on a space ship and there was nowhere else to go, we were in a very confined space, and it was very much a family show ... so if we had a kiss, where would it have led to? You know, those days family shows were really family shows, so we were told we should always keep the frisson going, but never step over any sort of boundaries. But there always was a little flirtation going on, and I think Avon didn't like that at all, I do think he and I were always slightly at war with each other.

Well, in episode three he says, “Blake's down on that planet, so let's go off together.”

That's right. But I resisted him, didn't I?

You did.

I was very loyal...

Your love for Blake was that strong.

My love for Blake.... and I think I threw my arms around him and said, “you're back,” in a really sincere way and I did mean it, I would have been bereft.

Watching it back, it's interesting to see how much your character has to do in the first series, but then has less to do in the second.

Yes, less... Well that's one of the direct reasons I left. I did feel that Jenna could have done an awful lot more in the series. She could have done a lot more of the decision-making, and I felt that every time we got into a bit of a scrape, the boys took over. And I always found that very frustrating. We kept asking for better scripts and ironically, years later I met Terry Nation at a convention in Chicago, and he said, iIf only I'd known you as a person ,” he said, “I could have written for your character much better.” But unfortunately, he never met us, or never met the women, and he said he felt his writing for men came to him more easily, and that the writing for women was... well, for me it felt that it was verging on the stereotype at some points.

You were the blond....

The blond bimbo, with the extra hair and the tight suits...

I liked the tight suits though, the tight suits were good.

[LAUGHING] I think a lot of people did, yeah, but it did get a bit wearing after a while. I wanted to be... I'd have liked to have been a bit more like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, you know, really getting my hands dirty and getting out there and doing more of the action.

That red leather outfit, though.

[LAUGH] The red leather outfit!

I was thirteen, and seeing you charging around in that...

... You really liked that. You did enjoy that, well I think probably quite a few of you did, but I look at it now... it's so tiny... how I got into it... I must have been doing the show with the Goths, I think, when I wore that...

“The Keeper”.

Yes, “The Keeper,” because I remember them throwing me from arm to arm and there was this awful splitting sound, because it was so tight and so uncomfortable, I mean it did split at one point.

Where?

I'm not going to tell you. You'll just have to imagine.

I'll get the DVD out.

Yeah, see if you can do a slow framing on it! But yes, um, somebody had it at a convention on display...

There's that black dress as well.

Ah, yes, that's much better. With the star at the neck, it was my Sin City dress. Very nice.

Do you remember Jenna's catfight with Cally?

We had, like, these ridiculous coloured drinks, didn't we? And we threw them over each other.

You say at one point, “you so and so.”

Did I really? That sounds like me improvising, actually, that's the sort of thing I would have just said. I was always forgetting my lines, as you probably know. I was terribly nervous in those days, and I said the most silly things and some times they kept them in. Did you hear the immortal one when I was asked to ... I can't remember who it was, it was either Geoffrey Manton [Production Assistant] or Vere Lorrimer [Director], but he said, “I want my heroes and heroines to run down the corridor as it were, and whirl around the other corridor and then go “bang bang,” as the aliens come towards you.” so, I did exactly that, I ran down the corridor, swerved to the left and went “bang, bang.” I had no idea, I was so naive that you put the sound effects on afterwards. It was a big learning curve, because I'd had little experience in telly.

In the first series you went around kicking a few people, but in series two you ended up doing a lot of teleport duty.

Yes, stuck at the desk. The teleport queen. I was very annoyed about, because I was perfectly able to do a lot of those stunts. I've always been pretty sporty and athletic and I would loved to have done more, but that's the way the cookie crumbles, and one of the reason I left was that I wasn't satisfied with the way the character was being developed.

Looking back now, and if at the age of twenty-five you'd had the experience you have now, do you feel you could really have turned that around?

God, I could have turned that around. Yes, I mean that is that sad thing. When you're young and nubile and out there, you know so little. Now, if I had a chance to take that character and play it, I can think of a million things... I would just know how to get the writers to write for me, but I didn't understand enough about the technique in those days. Now I would know exactly how to get the writers to write me good scripts. You have to show the writer in the way you act, the way you want it to go. When I, much later, did Emmerdale Farm, I was able to get the writers to write for me, because I had so much more experience, and they developed that part very nicely for me, and I had some great storylines.

Paul Darrow was in Emmerdale Farm. You weren't in during the same time...

No, it was just after I left. I was in it for about two and a half years, and Paul came just after that, yeah. I loved doing that as well, but again, I left that because I felt two years... I seem to be a sort of two year person. After two years I need to sort of move on. I need to just stimulate myself with another challenge. Things get too easy.

Doing Emmerdale Farm must have been very different from doing Blake's 7...

Oooh, gosh, yes. There were lots of differences. First of all, a lot of my working in Emmerdale was outside on a farm, and I was working out on a working farm and learning how to be a farmer, I was working away from home, I was doing many more episodes-- I was doing one hundred and ten episodes a year on Emmerdale, so I was working full time. I never had any time to come back to London. I had to live up there for two and a half years. And it was like factory work, working on Emmerdale, you never had time off. You'd be up at six every morning, you'd be working until six in the evening, you'd rush home, you'd delete the stuff you'd learned that day, you'd learn the new stuff overnight, you'd be straight in the next morning, so you were constantly learning and deleting, a lot of pressure, but of course the more you did it, the more you relaxed. So you learned a hell of a lot. I mean working on soaps for a long time, you learn to be very very relaxed in front of cameras. I felt much more in control during Emmerdale. I enjoyed it much more because I was older, I was more experienced. Contrawise, I would love to have done Blake's 7 again, you know, I think I would have got so much more out of it. I got very bored with the writing of Emmerdale a lot of the time, the same old things happening, and I think you didn't have the team that we had on the Liberator, you know, where we were very tight. We didn't have that tight little nucleus in Emmerdale. It was a very different sort of setup. But I loved the farming side of it, loved the animal side of it, and loved the countryside, it's beautiful working in Yorkshire.

So you'd describe it as sort of intensive farming?

Very intensive farming, yes! I learned to go organic.

David Maloney said that the main cast for Blake's 7 were put on two year contracts. So they had to do two series. There was an option on the Producer's side, so that if he wanted to get rid of anyone he could, but the cast couldn't leave of their own volition.

Absolutely. I was interested in leaving after the first series, but I wasn't allowed. I was very keen to go to university, and they said, “no you can't. We've got an option on you,” so I left after the second. Gareth and I left at exactly the same time. But he did come back, didn't he?

Actually he came back twice. He came back for the end of series three, where he was an hallucination...

He was an hallucination? I didn't realise that.

And Blake appeared with this huge Teddy Bear, which apparently explained why Avon was such a lunatic. It was taken from him when he was a small child. Next time you see Paul Darrow, you mention it to him. He'll like that.

My god, I didn't know that. That's extraordinary.

Did you ever watch the show when you were in it?

We used to watch bits of it, but I don't remember ever watching a whole show. It was terribly difficult in those days, cos I didn't have a video recorder. So you'd grab a bit and maybe you were lucky enough, if you were in BBC Television Centre, to see a couple of scenes that you had done, but I didn't often, in fact, I didn't really see a lot of the full episodes until a lot later, long after I'd left.

What did you think?

I was pretty horrified. I think it's quite a good thing to watch yourself, because you learn a lot.

Do you like watching yourself?

No, it's a horrible experience watching yourself. You're never satisfied. Whatever you see you thing, “oh god, I could have done that better,” or you look dreadful, or you think, “oh, I could have made so much more of that.” It's very very hard to sit back and watch yourself on telly.

There's a famous photograph of you and Jan Chappel standing next to the security robot from series one. Do you look at that picture and think “I have no recollection of that at all”?

No, I do have a... we were in the front garden of the studio, at Elstree, and there was a big, big photo shoot. I do vaguely remember it, it was an awfully stuffy day, I remember. Things do come back to you suddenly when you talk about them. But then they go back, I mean an awful lot of time has passed, has it not? Is it thirty years?

More.

I seem to recall that Jenna was always suffering...

And she also got tied up and carried off by hairy tribesmen.

Yeah, I think a lot of the things they got me to do were to slightly titillate the audience. And I think that's really what made me think “I've got to change my image a bit, cose otherwise I'm going to spend my whole life being a blond bimbo and nobody will take me seriously.” And at the time female liberation was developing more and more.

But that red leather outfit...

Was... do you know, now, I would love to wear it again! Now, at my age, I think “god, I'd adore to be a bimbo now!” But that's life, isn't it? You get older.

When recording Blake's 7 it was done on a pretty hectic schedule, and there were some cases where you'd go into studio and they'd say, “right, we're doing this scene from episode nine, and we're also doing pick-ups for episodes five, six and seven, which all takes place in the teleport bay, and then tomorrow we're doing episodes... that must have been very confusing to do, mustn't it? How do you maintain any sort of character continuity?

Well that happens all the time in telly, I mean it's nothing like as bad with Blake's 7 as it was on Emmerdale, when at any time you could be doing scenes for twelve episodes. Say you were in Annie Sugden's kitchen, all the scenes in episodes one to twelve that took place in Annie's kitchen would all be done in the space of two hours. So I'd be doing scenes after I had murdered someone, then scenes before I'd actually done it, then scenes mentally breaking down, and then I'd be happy again, and emotionally, you're on a see-saw. That is the art of television acting. You've got to remember where you were at that point and then play the scene. And also what you were wearing. But you have continuity people for that.

So you change costume...

Oh, all the time! Of course you do! Because if you're in episode one, and then you're in episode two, and it's later, you're going to be wearing a different outfit, so you've got people taking shirts on and off you, and I always seemed to have scarves in Emmerdale which had stripes on them, they were always trying to get the stripes in the right direction. Then your hair was different, so it's a massive amount of stuff to keep balanced in your head and you've got to keep concentrating so clearly, and in the days of Blake's 7 I found the concentration quite difficult. I was so sort of, “goodness, what are we doing now?” and I would get in a state, but I have learned now to be very calm, and you just have to focus and remember which bit you're at, where you are emotionally, what's going to happen next, what's just happened, what door am I going through, where would I be next-- it's very demanding stuff, but when you get it right it's easy.

I'm confused just listening to it!

That's how most people work in telly, though.

And that must have been a bit of a strain when you were so inexperienced on Blake's 7.

It was a tremendous strain, but what was even more of a strain was that we'd have two ways of working, we'd have the studio filming, which would be shot on a particular day at Wood Lane. So we'd rehearse all those scenes in the rehearsal room, in Acton, and then on that particular day of recording them, we'd go over to Wood Lane, and we would walk through all the moves in the studio, and then we'd go off and get our makeup and our outfits done, and then we'd have supper, which was about the worst thing to do, and then we'd start recording between... I think it was eight o'clock and ten o'clock at night. So you had no continuity, and in this two-hour period it was absolutely vital that everything was shot. If you went into overtime people would be screaming because of the extra money. And so if you forgot a line, or if you didn't stand on the right mark, or if one of the special effects didn't work, time would be ticking, ticking, ticking, and “my god, we've only got half an hour to get these four scenes in,” you know, and it was really nerve-wracking.

I've heard they used to switch the lights off on the stroke of ten.

Oh yeah, that'd be it. Plugs would be pulled. You'd have to pick up the scene later, on another day. It was all very confusing. Nowadays they do much more “rehearse-record,” which is, you rehearse a scene then you do it, which is a much easier way to work, but back then, it was a really barmy way of working, although, I don't know, they must obviously have had their reasons. And then you'd go off and film the bits in between those episodes a few weeks later, in Betchworth quarry or Wookey Hole or Black Park, or somewhere, and again you have to think, “oh, god, hang on, what was my level? You know, six weeks ago when I was in the studio at Wood Lane.”

What was your favourite chalk pit?

What was my favourite chalk pit? D'you know, I really enjoyed the one where we filmed the scenes with the Moon Discs for “Shadow”. I loved that. But it was a terrible filming process, cose it was pouring with rain the whole time.

Was it?

Oh yeah, and it was meant to look really sunny. So you were constantly sitting under umbrellas, and the second the rain stopped, people would come rushing out raking the sand, making it look flat, and the discs would be put on their strings and we were ready to roll, and then it's like raining again, and then there'd be guys with silver reflectors trying to hide the gray sky, and--

I was going to say, how did they do that?

They had silver reflectors all over the place, to make it look really hot, but it was a gray and rainy day. And we were just jumping in and out, trying to do it. I mean the weather is a massive, massive part of the filming. And come rain, sun, snow, I mean, imagine having to work in snow, that is hell. Freezing, absolutely freezing, standing round in the snow.

Looks good on film though.

It looks very good on film, but god it's uncomfortable. And then you're put back in a caravan which is sort of enormously hot, so you're going from one extreme to the other.

So you were saying that you wanted to leave at the end of series one, but you were contracted for another thirteen episodes. Did you feel a bit resentful about that?

Well, at the end of the day, if there's a contract there's not much you can do. It's probably my fault for not reading the small print. But I stuck to my guns, I did another nine months and I did enjoy it, but I knew that I wanted to go back and study, and arm myself with something for the future. I didn't want to be at the mercy of my blond bimbo-ness, I wanted to learn a bit and develop a bit more, and I'm very very glad I did that. It was definitely the right decision.

Are you glad that you did Blake's 7?

Yes, very glad! Oh god, yes. I mean it's quite fun to have been a bit of an icon of the seventies, and I also got to work with a lot of very talented people.

I remember reading somewhere that you got on very well with Bruce Purchase, who guest starred in “The Keeper”?

Yes, he was absolutely lovely. He certainly stands out as being one of the nicest visiting artists I ever worked with. He was delightful. We had to do all these ridiculous dances, and I had to lie down on cushions with him, and I had been quite a nervous member of the cast, and he was so... he was quite avuncular, and also very charming, very bright, and he was very kind to me. And we just laughed a lot. And he made me feel utterly relaxed. And he brought the best out in me, actually, in that episode. I remember very much, when you're a very young actor, with actors who are quite experienced you can feel quite intimidated, and he was terrific, a really nice guy. And he loved Shakespeare, too, we used to talk about that, so yeah, we had a lot in common.

That episode always makes me laugh, with all that stuff about him, as the leader of the Goths, wanting to pair-bond with Jenna.

It was absolutely barmy, wasn't it? And he wore those ridiculous plaits. It was very funny, the whole thing. We just laughed a lot, with pair-bonding and all of that, and he was very flirtatious in a very nice sort of way.

Do you get a lot of fan mail?

Well, I wouldn't say a lot, but I do get some, yes. And it's always terribly nice, you know, a letter from Australia saying they've just rewatched the series, or they've just discovered the series, and how thrilled they are. I find that amazing. You know, that's fantastic.

Did you get the letter from me, you know, the one with the photograph of you in the red leather outfit?

Yes, I've kept that in a special drawer.

Marked “strange correspondence.”

I do have a drawer for strange correspondence, I've had some pretty weird ones.

Want to talk about that?

No. At one point, I have to say, I asked for my letters to be opened for me, there were some real weirdos. That was at the height of the...

Well, I apologise for that.

[LAUGHS] And I should think so too. I was disgusted.

It's interesting because at the end of series two when you left, you weren't killed off, you weren't married to someone... you just disappeared.

Disappeared, yes, I could still be out there. I could come back.

Well you couldn't, because it was stated in the very last episode that you had been killed.

Was it?

Apparently you die spectacularly. You were running a blockade, with all these gunships after you, and finally, you pressed the self-destruct and blew yourself and them to Kingdom Come.

That's amazing. I died a heroine. But we don't strictly know that's true. It's reported speech, is it not?

Reported by Blake.

Well if Blake said it, then I believe it!

Anyway, since they didn't kill you off at the end of series two, do you think there may have been some sort of idea in the back of their heads that you might have come back in a few years' time and done some more? Were you ever approached to do the odd episode?

No, because I told them I was going to university and that was it. I was out of the business for three and a half years. I had a wonderful letter from Vere who never quite took it in, and it said “dear Sally-- thank you for being such a wonderful and vivacious part of the cast, and good luck with your O levels.” Which is just absolutely adorable. I've kept that letter. He was such a sweet man. So he never quite took on the fact that I was going to uni, but I did, and everyone knew. I was offered another series, something with Patrick Stewart actually, which I do regret turning down now. Oh, well, I got my degree, and that's what really matters.

What subject was your degree in?

Um, I did an English degree. I did a bachelor of arts degree, honours degree, and I specialised in Shakespeare, and I also did a directing course.

When at university, did everybody recognise you?

I think they probably did, but I played it down so much, because I wanted to integrate into university and I didn't want to be anything different. And I think, within a couple of weeks, people forgot about it. I never mentioned it, because even if they did recognise me, people wouldn't say much. And so, you know, it was forgotten very quickly, and I'm glad, cose it would have been pretty embarrassing.

So you never wore the red leather?

I did think about it, but I thought no.

What happened to that costume, by the way? Did you get to keep any of the costumes or--

I still have got my black Sin City dress, and I've got one silver boot. I don't know how I got one silver boot. I don't know what happened to the other one.

Apparently people kept stealing the Liberator bracelets, didn't they?

Yes, and if we'd kept a few we'd be millionaires by now.

How many have you got?

None! Damnit!

You missed a trick there.

I know! If only we'd done a lot of things. We could have cleaned up. But there we are. It's probably better we didn't.

Did you watch Blake's 7 after you'd left it?

Not for a while, but later on, particularly when it started coming out on DVD, and people very nicely sent us the box sets, and I thought “oh, this looks rather smart.” And I've had to do so many conventions and interviews over the years that I thought I'd better start mugging up a bit, otherwise I won't know anything at all! So yes, I have watched them, I'm not saying I remember it all, but I have watched them.

Now there's one final question I've got to ask you. Where does the name “Knyvette,” come from?

Knyvette is my grandfather's name, and it's got a long history, and I still haven't really worked all of it out. But my grandfather was called Knyvette Lee, and it comes directly from Sir Thomas Knyvett, who was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, so the Knyvetts go right down through history. And he, in fact, Sir Thomas Knyvett, was directly responsible for uncovering the gunpowder plot. And I used that name cose when I first started acting, my real name is Sally James, and there was already a Sally James enrolled in Equity. That was Sally James from TISWAS. So, as I couldn't use my real name, I thought, “well, I'll use the name I've always wanted, which was my grandfather's name. And my brother and my mother both had it as middle names.”

So, Sir Thomas Knyvett saved Parliament.

Yes, he did.

He's sure got a lot to answer for.

He has, hasn't he? Sorry.

Apology accepted. Sally Knyvette, thank you very much.

Thank you.


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