Season One Season Two Season Three Season Four Season Five

BBC The Sarah Jane Adventures

• "Til we meet again, Sarah" by Hugh Sturgess

"Til we meet again, Sarah" by Hugh Sturgess 26/6/14

Let's start with the salient points. The Sarah Jane Adventures was great and clearly the more mature of the two spin-offs. When the two spin-offs came out, I sought out Torchwood first, expecting that its ability to be more "adult" would lead to stronger stories than a Children's TV show - but maybe that's why SJA is so much better than the adventures of Captain Jack and his crew. Torchwood was pitched as "Doctor Who for adults". Chris Chibnall interpreted this to mean shitloads of guns and an ocean of mindless sex and gore. The series' chief writer turned in schlocky trash that he seemed to think was sophisticated (if he didn't, why run Day One right before The Ghost Machine?). It was adolescent, not adult, and at its strongest merely embraced its status as schlocky exploitation television. The Sarah Jane Adventures, on the other hand, was made in lieu of a show about a teenage Doctor on Gallifrey, and that label of "Doctor Who for kiddies" stuck. Chibnall thought he was being promoted to Torchwood, while I'm sure writers like Gareth Roberts, Phil Ford and Joseph Lidster felt shunned. So they put their hearts into it, hoping that a good performance might get them admitted to the ranks of the Chosen - those permitted to write for the Big Series. As a result, they made it fantastic. Why exactly has Chibnall written four episodes for Doctor Who and Phil Ford written but one (The Waters of Mars) and Lidster none at all?

The universal expectations for children's TV are: a) a small-budget, low-rent look; b) preachy, condescending writing; and c) terrible acting from child actors. For the overwhelming majority of its screen time, The Sarah Jane Adventures dodges those problems. First of all, yes, it obviously has a smaller budget than the Big Series, and, yes, this leads to some obvious examples of cheapness. The CGI is occasionally very poor (but no poorer than some stuff in Doctor Who, like the titular insect in The Unicorn and the Wasp) and resources were obviously stretched beyond breaking point when tasked with realistically depicting the Mona Lisa in London (it's just hanging there, no bullet-proof glass, no armies of security, etc.). Only The Last Sontaran actually looks like a high-budget fan film (washed-out footage of rushing around in a forest). The budget means that episodes are encouraged to reuse elements from the "mothership" series - the Slitheen get more run in Ealing than they ever did on Doctor Who on the watch of the man who created them. But actually it looks great. CGI has advanced so far so quickly that only a few years down the road, there isn't much of a visible difference between the average SJA episode and the average Doctor Who episode circa 2005-2006.

The pedigree of the guest cast is unexpectedly high. Jane Asher turns in a performance in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? that is equal at least to anything seen in an "adult" series, and the series also boasts Samantha Bond, Julian Bleach, Phyllida Law and Peter Bowles. Basically, all you have to do with these actors is point a camera at them and go home to produce great material. Russ Abbott (Secrets of the Stars) and Bradley Walsh (Day of the Clown) are JNT-style stunt-casting that could have really backfired, but instead are great. (Abbott hams it up shamelessly, but in a good way.) The woman cast as the old Rani in The Mad Woman in the Attic, for once, looks amazingly like her younger self. Mercifully, there's hardly any of the kiddification that you'd expect from actors who think it's a perfect opportunity to turn in ripe performances. Some have considered Chook Sibtain to be do so in Warriors of Kudlak, but I thought he was fine. The Slitheen in Revenge of the Slitheen and Suranne Jones in Mona Lisa's Revenge are unforgivable, however. Frankly, if one were tempted to think this is cheap-looking, one need only flick onto another children's adventure series at random and see the difference.

The writing is the real stand-out. Beyond isolated moments, the only examples of that dreadful, preachy "friends are important" talk you get in kids' TV are the syrupy monologues with which Sarah closes every season and Joseph Lidster. Lidster is obviously giving it his all, but his episodes are the closest the series gets to Preachy Children's TV. The Nightmare Man and The Mad Woman in the Attic actually have the message that friends are important! The Mark of the Berserker is so determined to have a happy ending that Paul Langer, hitherto depicted as a jerk who left his wife and child because he is shallow and selfish, is revealed to have an understandable, pitiable reason for abandoning his family, totally undermining the previous fifty minutes' characterisation. Nevertheless, I like Joe Lidster and I think it's mighty unfair that Chibnall's been given four episodes of Doctor Who in thanks for producing Torchwood and Lidster hasn't been given any.

I'd say that the series has only three true duffers: Revenge of the Slitheen, The Gift and Lost in Time. Revenge's script isn't dreadful, just banal and thin, and with too many similarities to School Reunion (alien stuff going on in a school IT department, with a fat kid and a super-genius in science class). The dialogue itself acknowledges that, but that hardly exonerates it. Furthermore, it's wrecked by pantomime kiddified performances that started out just within what we know of the Slitheen's character (childish, giggly, etc.) but by the end showed themselves to be just lazy caricatures by actors who couldn't be bothered.

The other two episodes were written by Rupert Laight, who is a dreadful hack. The Gift has a plot and a resolution that would have been original in the 1950s, and Lost in Time is the only occasion on which the show sinks to the level of Children's TV Logic, with Nazi "spies" who arrive in Britain in full SS uniform and plucky English kids who stop them. All three episodes are worse than any episode of Nouveaux Who (seriously, they put stuff like Curse of the Black Spot in perspective). (As an aside in lieu of a full review, Lost in Time and Eye of the Gorgon both have Clyde ringing a church bell. This is actually really hard to do, which is why there are professional bell-ringers. An amateur, particularly a child, could be seriously injured without raising anything but the most desultory sound.)

The writers, particularly Phil Ford, try to push the series outside the stereotype of children's TV almost immediately. Gareth Roberts said in interviews that he wanted to create a "full-blooded drama", putting it in just such a way as to reinforce my belief that the effort put into the series is the result of the dramatic equivalent of small-man syndrome. After Invasion of the Bane and Revenge of the Slitheen, which can at best be described as dumb schlocky fun, Eye of the Gorgon takes as its theme that people end their lives in old folks' homes where no one visits them and no one pays them any attention. Day of the Clown, beneath the boo-you're-scared imagery, is actually about the things out there that frighten parents, not scary, spooky things that frighten kids whom parents don't believe. Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith is about an elderly woman who thinks she has dementia. The Curse of Clyde Langer is a more serious than expected exploration of social isolation and homelessness. Even a relatively light-hearted episode like The Man Who Never Was mentions that slavery still exists in the world today, and, unlike Planet of the Ood, no one moans that it's a cheap shot. These aren't presented as Very Special Episodes, either.

Even the standard episodes are (with the exception of the aforementioned Doomful Three) never less than quality fun. They're not up to the standard of the Big Series, but they blow away autopilot episodes like The Vampires of Venice and The Rings of Akhaten (which is far more preachy and condescending that anything in SJA), despite not having production values nearly as lavish. Eye of the Gorgon, Warriors of Kudlak, Mark of the Berserker, most of Series 4 and The Man Who Never Was are just as good as any episode of Doctor Who, and leave Torchwood whimpering in a corner. (The Vault of Secrets "explains" the phenomenon of the men in black in a way that is implicitly contradicted by Day of the Moon, but it's easily fixed if you ask why the Alliance of Shades chose to disguise their androids as tall men in dark suits and ties, who fire energy from their hands and erase people's memory through hypnotism. Because they had the subconscious memory of the Silence, of course!)

The best of the series is joyously varied. Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? adapts Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? for the series (the title is, of course, more closely based on the film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane), and introduces the Trickster, an antagonist formidable enough to face off against the Doctor in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith and eventually be promoted (by name) to the Big Series in Turn Left. The series also has a small sub-genre of loopy high concept weirdness, such as Secrets of the Stars (astrology is real and can be used to take over the world!), Day of the Clown (the Pied Piper is real!), Mona Lisa's Revenge (the Mona Lisa contains a paint-based life-form who has been living inside the painting for 500-years!) and The Curse of Clyde Langer (a totem from Mexico puts a curse on Clyde so that anyone who says his name will be filled with hatred for him!).

It's frequently funny. For that, you can rely on Gareth Roberts, who manages to turn in stories strong enough to handle boatloads of comedy, which he hasn't done in his Doctor Who episodes (The Lodger and Closing Time are virtually excuses for him to muck around for forty-five minutes). The Man Who Never Was had me laughing at the screen.

My one real bugbear about the series' writing is its tendency to reduce everything to the work of aliens. Admittedly, the original series of Doctor Who did the same (mummies, vampires, Loch Ness Monsters, zombies, et al), but it creates the pervasive air of repetition. Gorgon: alien. Pied Piper of Hamlin: alien. Berserkers: aliens. Evil totem poll: alien. The Nightmare Man who lives in our dreams and feeds on our fear: alien. Living Mona Lisa and her hideous "brother": aliens. The ghost of seventeenth-century alchemist and black magician Erasmus Darkening: alien. Ruth White, lady adventuress who steals Sarah's life: alien. Couldn't we have spooky psychic entities, or just things-beyond-understanding? In Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith, Sarah begins to lose her memories and becomes hopeless and forgetful. Don't worry, it's only an alien stealing her life essence! In The Lost Boy, Luke's "real" parents turn up and he is taken away from Sarah Jane and sent to live with them. About fifteen minutes in, we find out that they're aliens getting orders from another alien and the whole thing is a sham. Only Secrets of the Stars and the Trickster's oeuvre have non-human villains who aren't variations on little green men (and Secrets was originally an official sequel to The Masque of Mandragora).

A more meta objection is one I have about Torchwood too: the absence of any consequences from the Big Series. The Christmas Invasion emphasises that humans now know about aliens, and, in the two years that follow, the Racnoss Star "electrocutes all over the place" to quote Wilfred Mott, Harold Saxon chats openly on TV about visitors from the stars, Buckingham Palace is nearly destroyed by a spaceship and the world is moved across the universe and taken over by Daleks. And the consequences in either spin-off are almost exactly zero. Children of Earth and Miracle Day are based on a single, exciting concept and watching how the world reacts - couldn't we have done the same with aliens? Surely politicians other the Master would have run on a "tough on aliens, tough on the causes of aliens" platform. Could Cardiff have become an intergalactic petrol station as alien ships came to refuel at the Rift? If the consequences of global acceptance of aliens are too big or too mundane to show on Doctor Who, why not put them in the spin-offs?

The Sarah Jane Adventures is an even worse offender than the others. It's set in London, the centre of alien activity, and yet you'd never know that the world was moved across space and invaded between Series 1 and Series 2. There's not the slightest mention of it. What happened to Commander Kaagh when the Daleks invaded? (Great spin-off possibility: Kaagh: Dalek Killer.) What did Maria's dad think of her relationship with Sarah when aliens came raining down on Earth? (Maybe that's why she isn't in The Stolen Earth?) In The Mark of the Berserker (written by Joe Lidster, who I think is the only writer to do this), Clyde's dad casually mentions "those Dalek things". Jesus, they TOOK OVER THE ENTIRE WORLD. Imagine an American TV show set in New York in 2002 that has a character say "that Bin Laden guy". That would be a comedy moment, right? In Enemy of the Bane, the Brigadier says (falsely) that he is planning his memoirs "now that the cat's out of the bag about aliens". Is it? There are books being published about the government's knowledge of aliens for decades? The Vault of Secrets has an alien-watch group, but the episode ridicules them as fools and lunatics, the way we laugh at UFO-spotters in real life. But aliens ARE real in the Doctor Who universe, and Ocean Waters, the groups' leader, really WAS abducted by the men in black. Why not flip it around and have these UFO groups be the sensible, respectable ones, now? Turns out they were right all along, etc. It's not as though there would be that many viewers who watched The Sarah Jane Adventures and not Doctor Who. Moffat has pushed The Stolen Earth in front of a train, so we have no idea what anyone knows now, but it's not as though the series had done anything interesting with it anyway.

The one thing that everyone thinks of when it comes to children's TV is bad acting from child actors. (That should probably be "child" actors, since Daniel Anthony was 20 - 20! - when the show started. That explains why Tommy Knight changes almost beyond recognition across the series, while Anthony looks exactly the same in Revenge of the Slitheen and The Man Who Never Was five years later.) Now, obviously none of the cast (Sladen included) is Lawrence Olivier, but in general they're never less than acceptable, and really quite good. The thing about child actors (whom I'm convinced everyone secretly hates for being so precocious) is that you can always tell that they're speaking to a script. Their sentences are too well structured to be real. No real people have a neat, structured sentence in their minds before they speak - even politicians, who think about what they say more than anyone else, um and ah and repeat themselves ("We are going to operate the operation Operation Sovereign Borders.") - and yet characters in fiction do that all the time. We're so used to it from adult characters that we don't notice it. Child characters show that up, and child actors don't do the little things that adult actors do to make dialogue seem more natural. They generally don't make choices in the acting the way experienced actors do, they don't put motivation or thought processes into their lines, so their performances are one-note.

The worst that can be said about the five juvenile leads (Maria, Luke, Clyde, Rani and Sky) is that they're inexperienced. The fairest that can be said about them is that they're fine. Not amazing, but fine. The series certainly had faith in its young stars. Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?, Mark of the Berserker, The Empty Planet, The Nightmare Man, Mona Lisa's Revenge and The Curse of Clyde Langer make the "kids" the central protagonists, with Sarah Jane a more peripheral figure. The Empty Planet is carried entirely by Clyde and Rani. Throughout the series, they're given exposition and emotional speeches in the conviction that they can carry the drama. And they can.

Daniel Anthony (Clyde) and Anjli Mohindra (Rani) improve out of sight over the course of the series, but their original performances weren't that bad to begin with. Series 1's laddish writing for Clyde makes him seem like a jerk, and Anthony's main sin is not softening that writing with his performance. It's frankly a challenging part to play without making Clyde unlikeable, and Anthony frequently slips up. (Also, who likes stuck-up kids in real life anyway?) Mohindra has a number of duff reaction shots and mishandled lines ("Are you really an alien?", in Day of the Clown, is asked at a totally inappropriate time in a totally inappropriate way), but luckily she's basically playing a normal person. Rani doesn't have much of a character - she's nice, courageous, upright and curious, which could describe any Doctor Who supporting protagonist (Sarah Jane, for instance). Yasmin Paige (Maria) has a perpetually hysterical fraughtness to her voice no matter the circumstances, but that's characterisation. Plenty of thirteen-year-old girls are like that.

One of the most rewarding elements of the series for the regular viewer is the relationship between Clyde and Rani. I'm convinced that Anthony and Mohindra put those layers into their performances before the writers thought to. Unresolved sexual tension isn't the most original decision, but name the kids' shows that handle it well. Anthony and Mohindra were thinking of leaving the series when it was cancelled, but the script for The Thirteenth Floor (another Clyde-and-Rani episode) convinced them to stay another year. I'm almost glad that we didn't see them go. Clyde's role as the most established regular other than Sarah Jane (Maria left at the beginning of Series 2 and Luke was drifting away from Series 4) means that by the end it was virtually the Clyde Langer Adventures. He introduces every episode ("13 Bannerman Rd is where Sarah Jane Smith lives!") and is given more and more to do as time goes by, doing cool things instead of just talking about being cool. In another few years, it would have been his show.

I'm going to talk about Tommy Knight for a bit. Luke Smith is a genetically engineered super-genius who was vat-grown and started life aged fourteen. That's not a part that most child actors are asked to play (simultaneously acting older and younger than his age), and there are plenty of adult actors who wouldn't be able to pull it off. Knight's work in Series 1 is often stilted, vacant and/or unnatural, he shrugs as a physical tic and he doesn't know what to do with his hands when he's speaking. But I actually think he's good. I think it works for the character he's asked to play. I was particularly impressed by Invasion of the Bane, in which Luke is at his most embryonic. He manages to handle "this is happiness", which is a terrible line despite Knight not because of him. Luke in Series 1 is indeed stilted, vacant and/or unnatural, but that's fine because Luke is meant to be awkward and uncomfortable in his skin, almost autistic and incapable of holding a conversation. I like the way he handles lines that show Luke's ignorance of slang or expressions ("a vegetable life form?", he queries when Sarah Jane describes a woman as a plant in Secrets of the Stars). Even his regular vacant expressions count as characterisation. Knight's weakness is always in the more regular stuff of delivering dialogue and making heartfelt conversations, though he's hardly scene-wrecking. His later work, when Luke has become normalised thanks to Clyde's influence, is weaker as a result, since Luke by that stage is so normal that he mostly does the stuff he's weaker at. Overall, I think it's effective and rather adorable, which has nothing to do with Knight starting off as merely cute and ending the series very dishy.

Sky isn't in enough episodes to really make up my mind about Sinead Michael, but she's fine. She's been asked to play a day-old adolescent who was genetically engineered to be a suicide weapon, which makes the total absence of guile or indeed thought processes in her acting (like almost all child actors, I repeat) kind of interesting. I sort of like her perpetually confused-looking scrunched-up facial expression (which is so perennial that she's wearing it in Clyde's drawing of her in the final shot of the series). The two most difficult parts to play in the series were given to the two youngest actors.

Elizabeth Sladen, like plenty of actors in Doctor Who, had a limited range but was unbeatable within that range. She's dependable in the Sarah Jane Adventures, occasionally surprising me with a particular line reading, and with occasional misfires. She's actually quite poor, for instance, in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, but that might be because Nigel Havers is either playing against the script in making Peter Dalton shallow and feckless or just phoning it in. But basically I love Elizabeth Sladen. There's a moment in The Curse of Clyde Langer when Sladen delivers unrelated dialogue in just such a way that she shows that Sarah is feeling terribly sad but doesn't know why, all just with tone and body language. In Prisoner of the Judoon, she finds an entirely new way to do alien possession, slinking and rasping like a lizard under the influence of the killer Androvax.

Most of the time, though, she's just good old dependable Sarah Jane Smith. Like David Tennant has said, it was always "the Doctor and Sarah", and the fact that she was restored to glory at the end of her life, in her own successful show, is wonderful. The day after Sladen died, Russell T Davies went to bed feeling ecstatically happy that he (and Gareth Roberts, Phil Ford and the rest of the team) had made Sarah Jane successful and loved again. Her death was national news. Davies only saves lives in his fiction, but thanks to him Sladen died the star of an award-winning hit, not an old has-been who occasionally did a Big Finish.

There's obviously nothing good about Sladen dying, but I think that that horrible event meant that the show ended at its height. As previously mentioned, Anthony and Mohindra were planning on leaving soon, which would have meant an entirely different show. They weren't just companions of Sarah, they were her family. The Battle of Bannerman Road, the planned finale to Series 5, would have featured an epic battle with the Trickster, ending with the destruction of Bannerman Rd (and Mr. Smith?). Clyde and Rani would have admitted their feelings for one another, and Jo would have returned. On the face of it, that would have packed the requisite punch for a final episode (had the fifth series's final six episodes been filmed before Sladen's death), but it would have been a bittersweet ending to the series, I think. The series developed over the years the running theme that Sarah Jane lived alone and isolated after leaving the Doctor, but gradually she found herself a family of sorts on Bannerman Rd. An ending that had Sarah's home destroyed, Clyde and Rani heading out the door and Luke and K9 already gone would have inevitably felt unpleasant. Sarah would end the series just as alone as when she started it (with Sky but without Mr. Smith or K9). I'd loved to have seen it, but it would have been devastating.

The Man Who Never Was may be a relatively lightweight story existing mainly for its comedy, but there's something satisfying about ending with an episode in which the aliens aren't evil, no one dies, and Luke returns, so we have the full Smith family together again. Rani's last line ("it's a family thing") and the series's last shot (Luke, the alien experiment, and Sky, the living alien superweapon, hugging as brother and sister) segue perfectly into the respectful final montage and Sarah's final words: "In all the universe, I never expected to find a family."

I can see why a lot of fans might have turned and run at the thought of a kids' show. I scarcely gave the show a thought as I raced off to Torchwood. Pulling myself out of the rubble of that disaster, I didn't even remember that there was another spin-off out there. It wasn't until Death of the Doctor that I was drawn in. The Doctor and Jo, written by Russell T Davies, sounded close enough to "real" Doctor Who to be safe. To my surprise, it was, to quote Joe Ford, "fan-bloody-tastic". I binge-watched the entirety of SJA's Series 4 in response. This isn't merely better at being a children's show than Torchwood is at being an adult show. It's better than Torchwood at being an adult show, if "adult" means quality drama that gives the viewer something to think about. Eventually, RTD swooped down on Torchwood to save it, and the result was Children of Earth, of which I'm not as keen as everyone else, but what's interesting is that it's virtually an "adult" version of an SJA episode. The 456's use of kids to communicate is practically begging for the Bannerman Road Gang to investigate.

Put it this way, the Doctor appeared in the Sarah Jane Adventures twice, as was lined up for a third go in Sky (but filming commitments for A Christmas Carol kept Matt Smith away). He never appeared in Torchwood.