A Job for the Doctor's Companions Quiz

Answer: Wilfred Mott

Played by veteran British actor Bernard Cribbins, the character of Wilfred Mott first appeared in the 2007 Christmas special 'Voyage of the Damned'. He worked on a newspaper stand and was the person who informed the Doctor that London was deserted because people were too worried to remain in the city given the strange events that had occurred over the previous couple of years (the draining of the River Thames in 2006's 'Runaway Bride' and the Sycorax blood control in 2005's 'The Christmas Invasion').

It was later revealed that Mott was the grandfather of the Doctor's companion Donna Noble. He got to travel in the TARDIS himself during the two-part episode 'The End of Time', which ended with the Doctor's regeneration from David Tennant to Matt Smith.

Answer: River Song

River Song's first appearance in 'Doctor Who' was in the episodes 'The Silence in the Library' and 'Forest of the Dead', which formed a two-part storyline during the 2007 series of the programme. Although the Doctor was meeting River for the first time, a quirk of time travel meant that for her it was initially just another meeting with a man she had known for almost her whole life. However, it turned out that it was something more significant - her death at the end of the episode meant it was his first encounter and her last.

River, played by 'ER' actress Alex Kingston, continued to make various guest appearances in the show despite her character's demise. It was revealed that she was the long-lost daughter of two of the Doctor's other companions - Rory Williams and Amy Pond - and had Time Lord-esque powers as a result of having been conceived onboard the TARDIS. She was also the Doctor's wife.

Answer: Donna Noble

Donna Noble (played by the actress and comedienne Catherine Tate) travelled with the Doctor in the 2008 series of the show after making her debut as the title character of the 2006 Christmas special 'The Runaway Bride'. However, it turned out that she hadn't actually run away from her wedding - she had just been transported on board the TARDIS as a result of being dosed with huon particles by her prospective husband, Lance. H.C. Clements, the company where both she and Lance worked, turned out to be owned by the Torchwood Institute and had been infiltrated by the Empress of the Racnoss (a giant spider-like alien race) as part of a plan to rescue her offspring from the centre of the Earth.

Several mentions of Donna's prowess as a temp were made during the series, she credited her organisation skills for her ability to decipher the symbols on an alien spaceship in 'The Doctor's Daughter' and her typing speed for defeating the Daleks in 'Journey's End'.

Answer: Clara Oswald

During her time with the Eleventh Doctor, Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) worked as a nanny, but she took up a job working as an English teacher at Coal Hill School sometime before the events of the 50th anniversary special episode 'The Day of the Doctor'. Whilst she travelled with Peter Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor, some of her pupils occasionally got caught up in their various adventures, including when they investigated an alien robot in the school in 'The Caretaker', took a trip to the moon in 'Kill the Moon' and when a school trip to a museum went badly wrong in 'In the Forest of the Night'.

Although Clara Oswald made her first appearance on 'Doctor Who' in 2012, Coal Hill School appeared in the very first episode of the series, 'An Unearthly Child', broadcast on 23 November 1963. The Doctor had enrolled his granddaughter, Susan Foreman, at the school and ended up travelling through time and space with two of her teachers - Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright (neither of whom taught English) - after they became curious about their unusual pupil's background.

Answer: Rose Tyler

Rose Tyler's job as a shop assistant at Henrik's Department Store in London ended very shortly after she met the Doctor for the first time, mainly because he blew up the building after its shop dummies turned into Autons and started trying to kill everyone. Rose then helped the Doctor to locate and destroy the Nestene Consciousness and earned herself an invitation to travel with him in the TARDIS. These events took place during the 2005 episode 'Rose', the first TV episode of 'Doctor Who' to be produced in over 15 years following the cancellation of the programme at the end of 1989. (A TV film starring Paul McGann as the Doctor had been made in 1996, but failed to reignite interest in reviving the programme.)

Rose, played by former pop singer Billie Piper, was a companion to both the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and David Tennant's Tenth Doctor. She left the TARDIS after becoming stuck in a parallel world and promptly gained a much more prestigious job working for the parallel Torchwood Institute.

Answer: Jack Harkness

Captain Jack Harkness (real name unknown) became one of the Doctor's companions despite trying to con him with a Chula ambulance during the London Blitz of 1941. Played by John Barrowman, he turned out to be an ex-Time Agent who was attempting to exact revenge upon his former employers with a poorly thought-out criminal campaign.

After joining the Doctor and Rose Tyler in the TARDIS he turned into one of the good guys and ultimately gave his life in order to buy the Doctor more time to defeat the Daleks in the finale of the 2005 series. Fortunately for him, he was brought back to life, granted immortality and went on to star in his own spin-off show - 'Torchwood'.

Answer: Martha Jones

Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman, was a medical student when the hospital she worked in was hoovered up by the Judoon and plonked down on the moon. Luckily one of her patients turned out to be the Doctor and he, with Martha's help, was able to sort out the situation and get the building returned to Earth before their air supply ran out. Although initially invited on board the TARDIS for a one-off trip in time and space, Martha ended up being the Doctor's full-time companion for the 2007 series of the show and then made several guest appearances in later series.

It was during the 2007 two-part story 'Human Nature' and 'The Family of Blood' that Martha ended up having to work as a maid in a boarding school, after the Doctor turned himself into a human and lost his memories of his true self. The job turned out to be a somewhat precarious position for a black woman in the 1910s. After she left the TARDIS, the Doctor recommended her to UNIT - a military force tasked with protecting the Earth from alien invasion - and she became their medical officer.

Answer: Rory Williams

Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) became a companion of the Eleventh Doctor because his fiancée, Amy Pond, had known the Doctor since her childhood and was already travelling with him through time and space. His job as a nurse played a role in the events of 'The Eleventh Hour' - Matt Smith's first full episode of the show - when one of his patients was impersonated by Prisoner Zero. Rory's first stint on the TARDIS was short-lived though as he was swallowed up by a crack in space and time in the episode 'Cold Blood'.

It later transpired that Rory's consciousness had been used by the Autons to programme a plastic duplicate of a Roman centurion and Rory was then left with the memory of spending 2,000 years in that role.

Answer: Sarah Jane Smith

Although she had one adventure with the Tenth Doctor in 'School Reunion', Elizabeth Sladen's character Sarah Jane Smith was primarily a companion of the Third and Fourth Doctors (Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker). Her first appearance was in the serial 'The Time Warrior', which was aired in 1973-74. At that point in her history she was a young journalist who wanted to investigate the mysterious disappearances of scientists from a research centre, but instead ended up being captured by a medieval bandit and embroiled in a battle against a Sontaran.

After several years travelling with the Doctor, Sarah Jane left the series when the Doctor was recalled to his home planet of Gallifrey at the end of the 1976 episode 'The Hand of Fear'. In 'School Reunion' it was later revealed that Sarah Jane had assumed the Doctor would come back for her and had spent decades mourning the loss of her life on the TARDIS. The character had her own spin-off show 'The Sarah Jane Adventures' from 2007-2011, where she worked alongside her adopted children and their friends to save Earth from frequent alien incursions. That series was ended by Sladen's death in April 2011.

Answer: Amy Pond

The Eleventh Doctor first met Amelia Pond in the 2010 episode 'The Eleventh Hour' when he and the TARDIS crash landed in her garden, shortly after his regeneration. He promptly got the seven-year-old to cook him a meal of fish fingers and custard and identified the crack in her bedroom wall as a gap in the fabric of space and time before climbing back into his time machine and promising her he would be back in five minutes. Unfortunately - while he thought he'd returned promptly - in reality 12 years had passed and young Amelia had turned into 19-year-old Amy, who had a job as a kissogram. Amy was portrayed by the Scottish actress Karen Gillan, while her younger self was played by Gillan's real-life cousin.

Amy was the Doctor's companion for two-and-a-half series of the show, although for some of that time she and her husband Rory returned to live on Earth and only accompanied the Doctor on his adventures on a part-time basis. The arrangement only came to an end when they were both transported back to New York in the 1930s by the Weeping Angels. The Doctor was unable to either retrieve them or even pop in for a visit, thanks to a paradox created by their presence there.