Our beloved Billie Piper is on the cover of this week’s Radio Times, not for playing Rose but Hero in next Monday’s BBC TV adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. Actually, it’s not really the Bard, it’s a modern-day updating of Will’s original storyline, in the same way the BBC re-did The Canterbury Tales (also starring the sensational Ms. Piper) a couple of years ago.

This is not the first time that an actress has crossed over from Doctor Who companion to Shakespeare lead. The incomparable Lalla Ward played Ophelia in an excellent BBC production of Hamlet in between her two seasons as Romana. It must have been quite a shift to go from working with Graham Crowden in The Horns of Nimon to Derek Jacobi, Patrick Stewart and Claire Bloom in the Bard’s Danish tragedy and then back to talking about tachyonics with Tom Baker, but our beloved Lalla was a trouper.

I’m actually looking forward to seeing this. True, I would have loved Billie speaking in iambic pentameter, but I’ll be interested in seeing in what they can do. Hero is an interesting character choice for Billie, because in the Shakespearean version she can be played incredibly passively—so much so, that she often fades into the background in favour of the vastly more fun Beatrice (who is played here by Blackpool‘s Sarah Parish, which gives me all the more reason to want to see this). It’s obvious the producers want to try and do something different with the female roles in some of the Bard’s plays. They certainly got the right actress for the part, here, if that’s the case.