Karen Gillan, aka Doctor Who companion Amy Pond, finds herself in the grooviest of time warps when she plays Sixties supermodel Jean Shrimpton in BBC4's We’ll Take Manhattan.

The drama charts the relationship, both romantic and professional, between Shrimpton and her photographer lover David Bailey, and particularly what happened during a week-long photo shoot in a freezing Manhattan in 1962 for British Vogue.

With her gawky figure and doe-eyed looks, Shrimpton went against the accepted norms for fashion models at the time, who tended to be elegant and ladylike. And in insisting on using his girlfriend for the shoot, Bailey was defying the wishes of the fashion bigwigs at Vogue.

TVChoice caught up with Karen and Aneurin Barnard, who plays David Bailey, to talk about depicting two iconic figures in a pivotal Sixties moment…

How much did you know about David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton before shooting We’ll Take Manhattan?
Karen Gillan I was aware of them, because my boyfriend, who’s a photographer, had shown me some of the photos he’d done of her, and I thought she was amazing. But I know a lot more about them now because I did loads of research!

Aneurin Barnard All I knew about David Bailey was that he’d shot an amazing black and white photo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. To be honest, I didn’t know anything about Bailey and Shrimpton until I was approached about this script.

What’s it like playing two famous people, and have you met the real David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton?
Karen Gillan I would love to meet Jean, but she doesn’t really like any press attention and is busy running her hotel in Penzance. Footage of her is really rare, so I just found everything I could on the internet and watched that. She has a sort of nice girl country English accent, which I keep slipping into when we’re not filming — it’s really weird! There’s a certain level of pressure in playing her, because she was so huge, so iconic.

Aneurin Barnard I haven’t met David Bailey yet, but I’m going to go down and see him as soon as we’ve finished filming. I’m quite nervous because I want to make sure he’s happy with what I’m doing. I’d love it if he watched We’ll Take Manhattan with me, over a bottle of whisky! I’ve been shooting with real film in my camera on set, and I speak in Bailey’s Cockney accent [Aneurin is Welsh] even when we’re not filming, to stay in character.

Karen, what did your Doctor Who co-star Matt Smith say about you taking on this role?
Karen Gillan I did speak to him about it, mainly about what it would be like doing something different from Doctor Who, because I’d forgotten what that’s like! He just said to really savour the experience, because it would be so different. I want to do jobs that I really care about rather than just going to work for the sake of it. We’ll Take Manhattan was a no-brainer for me. I am really interested in that period of the Sixties, when the whole youth thing was so powerful, and fashion was just lovely. The whole feel of this drama is that it’s all about the mischief that Bailey and Shrimpton got up to, and I hope people will think, ‘That looks really fun!’

Martina Fowler