Return of the Sarah Jane Adventures
Well I'm a day or so behind in watching the first two parter of this 'children's' sci fi programme, but caught up on it today and enjoyed it very much. Sarah Jane Smith is a national treasure - at least, she should be. Anyone even approximately my age who remembers watching Doctor Who of a Saturday afternoon in the mid nineteen seventies will have a memory of Sarah (she tended to be just Sarah in the original programme) - last assistant/ companion to Jon Pertwee's Doctor, first one to Tom Baker's brooding depiction of the Time Lord - before he got too facetious and not a little camp. Sarah was my idol. I was only young, but I thought I could grow up to be something like her - adventurous, not afraid to be afraid, of course, but with a sense of initiative nonetheless and a 'voice' all of my own. Sarah was a journalist - she still is, in the Sarah Jane Adventures - and I thought perhaps I could be one too. And indeed, I did end up as a kind of writer after all, though a very different kind. Still we have to teach all sorts in the creative writing classes, so only yesterday I was discussing hard, soft, breaking and rolling news with the first year undergraduates, and getting them to write their pyramid-shape news articles (i.e. important info first, then explanations and expatiations) and their delayed drops (stories with revelatory twists in the tails).
But back to Sarah Jane. I remember when she left Doctor Who, in 1975's 'The Hand of Fear' Story. It was traumatic - my first experience, in a way, of loss. I resented her replacement character, the perfectly good (albeit indecently dressed) Leela, and thought about giving up on watching the programme altogether, retreating into a fantasty sequence in my own head where my favourite character still shared centre stage with the Doctor. But I carried on watching the broadcast edition in the end.
Sarah Jane as a character has made a number of reappearances - in the not-so-successful 'K9 and Company' and also in the Audios made for the BBC by Big Finish. I enjoyed those - even though the stories are uneven - but Sarah's character there is a more 'adult' version and can get into more traumatic situations.
However, since those days she made her triumphant return in a cameo to David Tennant's Doctor, where she finally said 'goodbye' - ironically, she's been popping up in further cameos ever since, and also given her own series, where her best friends are adolescent schoolchildren, and her adopted son is a genius-but-socially-naive 'creation' of alien enemy no. 1, the Baine.
Despite all this though, I can't help but love the programme - sonic lipstick et all. It's quite remarkable that a children's TV character so important in one's formative years should continue and resurface so many decades on. The older Sarah Jane is - well - older, but more independent, more eccentric, much better dressed and indeed more Doctorish than she ever has been before. The stories have been pretty good too; like old-style classic Whos, with short episode times and built in cliff hangars. Some of them, especially the ones with the quite terrifying master of chaos, the Trickster, are of superb quality and could sit well in the prime time world of Nu Who.
Things have been said about the budget cuts and consequent falling-off of quality as the Sarah Jane Adventures continue, but I thought this opening two parter, Prisoner of the Judoon, was pretty good on a number of counts.
It does take risks, though, and I'm not talking about the lack of CGI and return of men/aliens dressed up in rubber costumes. Rather in this story the absence of Sarah Jane's character for much of the two episodes. Not of the redoubtable Lis Sladen, however, as Sarah Jane falls victim to the criminal 'veiled' life form, Androvax, who takes over her body and mind, leaving the kids to sort things out - although Sarah makes ghostly appearances in reflective surfaces, a kind of personified conscience for Androvax, and for us all. Of course Sarah was periodically possessed by evil alien forces in the good old days too - Mask of Mandragora, Hand of Fear etc - but she wasn't the key character there, so a consequent feeling of vulnerability for the 'young' viewer wasn't so strong.
These days even the Doctor is sometimes incapacitated in his own series, leaving the 'companions' with the task of saving and solving. I guess I'm a bit old school in liking a hero, however eccentric, around most of the time. Mind you Sarah Jane has been absent before in her own series - 'Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane' taking her away from the main action in a similar way. However, the difference here is that Lis is still present - extraordinarily so as her acting of Androvax is really quite disturbing. So I enjoyed it for that.
Also for the moral/human dilemmas which were aired, albeit lightly, in the story. Firstly - aliens aren't monsters. Even the horrible ones might have a reason for their destructiveness. Androvax, his homeworld destroyed, is a case in point. Androvax is a subscriber to the 'all ends in death and destruction anyway' school of pessimism. This world will end soon enough, these finite lives will finish in a while - might as well bring it about now. I thought this had some echo of the ghastly philosophical challenge of the Torchwood species 456, who argued that loads of children die or are killed anyway, all the time, so why not provide the 456 with the quota they demand? Nasty stuff, and truly destructive thinking.
Sarah Jane herself was able to counter it. It might seem as though life is dying and ending all the time, and that this is the guiding principle of the universe. But it's only one side of the deal: new life, development and growth, occur all the time too, and couldn't happen without the apparently finite aspects of life. Similar to the Doctor himself in The Brain of Morbius...'Death is the Price We Pay for Progress'. Tough stuff for a kid's programme in the seventies. I remembered it though.
As for Sarah Jane - long may she continue, sonic lipstick, dubious super-computer and all. Next week's looks pretty good, if I can survive my classes until then. There's always a chance....
But back to Sarah Jane. I remember when she left Doctor Who, in 1975's 'The Hand of Fear' Story. It was traumatic - my first experience, in a way, of loss. I resented her replacement character, the perfectly good (albeit indecently dressed) Leela, and thought about giving up on watching the programme altogether, retreating into a fantasty sequence in my own head where my favourite character still shared centre stage with the Doctor. But I carried on watching the broadcast edition in the end.
Sarah Jane as a character has made a number of reappearances - in the not-so-successful 'K9 and Company' and also in the Audios made for the BBC by Big Finish. I enjoyed those - even though the stories are uneven - but Sarah's character there is a more 'adult' version and can get into more traumatic situations.
However, since those days she made her triumphant return in a cameo to David Tennant's Doctor, where she finally said 'goodbye' - ironically, she's been popping up in further cameos ever since, and also given her own series, where her best friends are adolescent schoolchildren, and her adopted son is a genius-but-socially-naive 'creation' of alien enemy no. 1, the Baine.
Despite all this though, I can't help but love the programme - sonic lipstick et all. It's quite remarkable that a children's TV character so important in one's formative years should continue and resurface so many decades on. The older Sarah Jane is - well - older, but more independent, more eccentric, much better dressed and indeed more Doctorish than she ever has been before. The stories have been pretty good too; like old-style classic Whos, with short episode times and built in cliff hangars. Some of them, especially the ones with the quite terrifying master of chaos, the Trickster, are of superb quality and could sit well in the prime time world of Nu Who.
Things have been said about the budget cuts and consequent falling-off of quality as the Sarah Jane Adventures continue, but I thought this opening two parter, Prisoner of the Judoon, was pretty good on a number of counts.
It does take risks, though, and I'm not talking about the lack of CGI and return of men/aliens dressed up in rubber costumes. Rather in this story the absence of Sarah Jane's character for much of the two episodes. Not of the redoubtable Lis Sladen, however, as Sarah Jane falls victim to the criminal 'veiled' life form, Androvax, who takes over her body and mind, leaving the kids to sort things out - although Sarah makes ghostly appearances in reflective surfaces, a kind of personified conscience for Androvax, and for us all. Of course Sarah was periodically possessed by evil alien forces in the good old days too - Mask of Mandragora, Hand of Fear etc - but she wasn't the key character there, so a consequent feeling of vulnerability for the 'young' viewer wasn't so strong.
These days even the Doctor is sometimes incapacitated in his own series, leaving the 'companions' with the task of saving and solving. I guess I'm a bit old school in liking a hero, however eccentric, around most of the time. Mind you Sarah Jane has been absent before in her own series - 'Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane' taking her away from the main action in a similar way. However, the difference here is that Lis is still present - extraordinarily so as her acting of Androvax is really quite disturbing. So I enjoyed it for that.
Also for the moral/human dilemmas which were aired, albeit lightly, in the story. Firstly - aliens aren't monsters. Even the horrible ones might have a reason for their destructiveness. Androvax, his homeworld destroyed, is a case in point. Androvax is a subscriber to the 'all ends in death and destruction anyway' school of pessimism. This world will end soon enough, these finite lives will finish in a while - might as well bring it about now. I thought this had some echo of the ghastly philosophical challenge of the Torchwood species 456, who argued that loads of children die or are killed anyway, all the time, so why not provide the 456 with the quota they demand? Nasty stuff, and truly destructive thinking.
Sarah Jane herself was able to counter it. It might seem as though life is dying and ending all the time, and that this is the guiding principle of the universe. But it's only one side of the deal: new life, development and growth, occur all the time too, and couldn't happen without the apparently finite aspects of life. Similar to the Doctor himself in The Brain of Morbius...'Death is the Price We Pay for Progress'. Tough stuff for a kid's programme in the seventies. I remembered it though.
As for Sarah Jane - long may she continue, sonic lipstick, dubious super-computer and all. Next week's looks pretty good, if I can survive my classes until then. There's always a chance....
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