British actress Mary Tamm was interviewed on BBC Radio today in a shameless plug for the release of the box set containing her entire body of work on the sixteenth series of Doctor Who in 1978. Eagle-eyed viewers may already have spotted the clue to where the Estonian connection comes into this story: the actress' surname, Tamm, which is pretty much the local version of Smith (although it means 'oak tree').I had always wondered - that is, since coming to Estonia - whether there was anything to her name linking her to the country, but had never bothered to check. What was revealed to me as I listened to the interview has probably been common knowledge for at least thirty years, and it is rather a blot on my fandomness to only discover it now. But, well, whatever really.
Turns out our Mary, who was born and raised in Bradford in England, was the daughter of Estonian refugees who fled the country after World War II. She spoke Estonian as her first language right up until she started school, and claims to still speak the language today, although not all that often, as she doesn't know that many Estonians.
I say 'claims to speak' because at the beginning of the interview the host attempted to greet her in Estonian with the phrase 'meeldiv teiega kohtuda' (i.e. 'pleased to meet you', as you might reasonably guess), and while it ended rather badly, it had started rather well - and yet our Mary asserted that whatever the host was trying to say, it certainly wasn't Estonian. I mean come on, even I could tell what the woman was getting at.
I wonder if I should write a long letter to Mary in Estonian and see if she replies. I could ask her all sorts of things about about her time on Doctor Who, since the DVD box set she was there to promote, The Key To Time, is currently winging its way to me courtesy Amazon.co.uk (and I've seen the episodes in question a million times before). I'd have to brush up on my science fiction/fantasy vocabulary a bit, but then I suspect if I did it might all be for nought.At the very least, Estonia now has another actress with a tenuous link to the country it can parochially claim as its own.
