Watched City of Death today, sort of background TV while I tidied up and recabled behind my PC.
Lalla Ward is just magnificent as Romana, isn't she? She's impossibly cute and sweet, but at the same time utterly sells to me that she's a hundred-and-something years old, and is a little young and sweet and naive by the Doctor's standards but is nonetheless a Time Lord with vast knowledge above ours. I love how they fight over the significance of the Mona Lisa, the Doctor insisting it is one of the great artistic wonders of the universe, her arguing that, no, well, it's really just Earth.
She's typical by old Who standards in one sense - in this she ends up captured briefly and by and large follows the Doctor's lead, and yet she actually gets more done really here and feels like a more active presence than all the modern companions but probably Rose & Donna, and even in the case of those two only sometimes. Ward really did something great with that part. I also love her outfit; they've always cute, and it's clear they're going for that, but also there's an eccentricity to it that really matches the Doctor. She and Tom weren't married at this point, but you get the feeling that perhaps stuff was already going on off-screen at this point, as the chemistry is fantastic.
I think she'd be an incredibly hard role to cast now; you're basically looking for that same otherworldiness you look in casting the Doctor. With Capaldi if they were to bring her back, they could cast her older, but in a sense I think slightly younger and sweeter (she is several hundred years younger than the Doctor, after all) is sort of a trait of the character; perhaps someone in their early 30s opposite Capaldi, so a bit older than the standard companion. Basically, you're looking for a female Matt.
And the script! What work by Douglas Adams, really. A lot of things about Adams' untimely, early death bum me out - that he never got to see some of the concepts he talked about in Hitchhikers come to be with modern technology, for instance - but it also makes me so sad he was only a few scant years from seeing a show that he held very dear explode in popularity again. I think he'd be writing for the show now if he were still around. A great loss.