Was Mel really a terrible companion?

Can't stand TV Mel, grateful for her Big Finish glow-up.

On TV, I think, Mel slots very neatly into the "utterly generic and unmemorable sidekick" archetype. She's not bad exactly, but not good either. Mostly just extremely bland and forgettable, like so many other Classic companions (arguably most Classic companions). The only thing that's really, truly, honestly terrible about her is that the (often pretty dull) scripts for her episodes would end on cheap cliffhangers, with Mel letting out several sequential extremely high-pitched shrieks.

Maybe it's a hypersensitivity thing but I found them pretty intolerable.

But all that said, like several of the other companions in that archetype, I find Mel much more tolerable -- and enjoyable even -- in her Big a finish adventures. Obviously Big Finish has its fair share of lazy and hackneyed tropes, but in general they tend to be very good about allowing companions to be more than just damsels and exposition vehicles.

Of course, it must be said that on audio, pretty much all of Colin Baker's co-stars suffer for the inevitable comparison to Maggie Stables, against whom they invariably come up wanting. Mel's certainly better on audio than on-screen, but it's hard to rate her too highly when she's positioned so closely to Evelyn Smythe.

She was written terribly. Watching her intro in TOATL it was clear that nobody really had a clue what to do with her and that made it hard for Bonnie to get a handle on the character. The fact that she had to deal with godawful lines like “How utterly evil” made me feel sympathy for the actor not the character. Fortunately she got a better deal in Season 24 and got more consistent writing in stories that were not very much better. I think Bonnie Langford did an amazing job with the hand she was dealt.