Chapter The 119th, where the blog spins off its normal course!
Plot:
Sarah Jane Smith stays at her Aunt Lavinia's house in the Cotswolds for Christmas. Her aunt moved to this village a couple of years earlier, and started a market gardening business with some of the locals. Lately, its been going through a bit of a slump, so those locals - unbeknown to their business partner - decide to have a human sacrifice to Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, to improve turnover. Or, they may be planning the sacrifice as revenge because Lavinia wrote a letter to the local paper denouncing witchcraft. It's not clear. Apparently all this sacrifice and witchcraft is traditional round these parts. When Sarah arrives, Lavinia has mysteriously gone on her planned lecture tour of the US a month early, which puts Sarah on her guard. In Lavinia's absence, Sarah has to look after her aunt's ward Brendan. With him, she finds K9 Mark 3, who's been crated up at Lavinia's place after having been delivered by the Doctor as a gift for Sarah many years before. They get K9 to help them solve the mystery of Lavinia's whereabouts.
Despite having been put on her guard, Sarah still leaves Brendan on his own and goes to a party for a pair of local swingers, Pip and Jane - sorry, I mean Howard and Juno - Baker. Gardener George Tracey and his son Peter attempt to kidnap Brendan, but K9 sees them off. Sarah - now even more on her guard - doesn't notice when Peter comes back the following night and kidnaps Brendan for realsies. She's not much of a guard, really. With K9's help, she finds all the locations where a ritual might be happening, and they check them out one by one, arriving just in time to save Brendan. Later, Sarah and Brendan are round at the Bakers for Christmas lunch, laughing about Brendan's near death experience and subsequent trauma. Ho ho. Aunt Lavinia calls, and she's safe and well. Meanwhile, K9 practises singing a Christmas carol.
Despite having been put on her guard, Sarah still leaves Brendan on his own and goes to a party for a pair of local swingers, Pip and Jane - sorry, I mean Howard and Juno - Baker. Gardener George Tracey and his son Peter attempt to kidnap Brendan, but K9 sees them off. Sarah - now even more on her guard - doesn't notice when Peter comes back the following night and kidnaps Brendan for realsies. She's not much of a guard, really. With K9's help, she finds all the locations where a ritual might be happening, and they check them out one by one, arriving just in time to save Brendan. Later, Sarah and Brendan are round at the Bakers for Christmas lunch, laughing about Brendan's near death experience and subsequent trauma. Ho ho. Aunt Lavinia calls, and she's safe and well. Meanwhile, K9 practises singing a Christmas carol.
Context:
Another new Doctor Who blu-ray boxset arrived, covering season 18, Tom Baker's final year. This one is not so close to my heart as the previous release (Peter Davison's debut and the first episodes I ever watched live on broadcast). I was still a non-believer watching Buck Rogers on ITV at the time of Baker's swansong run. I snapped up the set on release anyway, as it is a set of stories I've subsequently come to respect, rather than necessarily love. As usual, I planned to roll a die to decide which show from the set I would blog. I've already covered three of the season 18 stories, so I had a choice of four remaining. I also like to leave open the option not to blog a story at all, to preserve something of this experiment's random selection raison d'etre. That made five choices, but there's no such thing as a five-sided die. Then I remembered K9 and Company was tacked on to this release, on the Bonus Material disc - it could take up space number 5. I rolled a standard six-sided die, hoping for Logopolis with new special effects (4), or maybe Warrior's Gate, my favourite story of the year (3). I rolled a 5. K9 and Company?! Sorry, gods of Chance, but faced with that prospect, I rolled again. Another 5. And again. Yet another 5. The universe must really hate me: in short order, I am to complete the Doctor Who oeuvre of writer Terence Dudley, four of the silliest Who or Who-related stories there ever have been.
I watched the story with the Better Half and all three kids (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6). Everyone had a little shimmy to the theme tune, but it went downhill from there. The action was holding the kids' attention early on, but - despite managing to sit through two middle-aged women talking about the local postmistress, and endless, endless discussions about soil - they'd had enough before the climactic sequence, and drifted off. The Better Half and I managed to the end. My youngest is usually quick to spook, but had no problem with any of the coven scenes. The Better Half and I tried keeping a tally of the sheer number of costume changes Liz Sladen goes through, but we lost count. I'm not sure she's dressed the same in any two contiguous scenes.
I watched the story with the Better Half and all three kids (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6). Everyone had a little shimmy to the theme tune, but it went downhill from there. The action was holding the kids' attention early on, but - despite managing to sit through two middle-aged women talking about the local postmistress, and endless, endless discussions about soil - they'd had enough before the climactic sequence, and drifted off. The Better Half and I managed to the end. My youngest is usually quick to spook, but had no problem with any of the coven scenes. The Better Half and I tried keeping a tally of the sheer number of costume changes Liz Sladen goes through, but we lost count. I'm not sure she's dressed the same in any two contiguous scenes.
First Time Around:
I didn't know K9 and Company was silly when I first saw it. I thought the beginning title sequence was exciting and the story was magical. I was only ten years old, mind. This would have been on Christmas Eve 1982 when it had a repeat showing on BBC2. The original showing, on 28th December the previous year, came shortly after the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat season, a set of vintage stories showcasing old Doctors which ran on week-nights in Autumn 1981, which was what had hooked me in to Doctor Who in the first place. I no doubt would have loved to have had an extra 50 minutes of Who-related goodness to enjoy before starting on my first broadcast season proper, but I had no knowledge that K9 and Company existed. It wasn't trailed at the end of any of the repeats, and I must have missed any advertising of it in the yuletide rumpus. Watching a year on, not knowing that this wasn't its premiere, I enjoyed it. But I was a full-on fan by then, and had watched simply loads of Doctor Who, including Earthshock, so it probably wasn't as special to me as it would have been a year earlier. My only clear memory was that I was viewing it on my own on the portable TV in my Mum and Dad's bedroom, which suggests that the rest of the family were watching some other channel's festive fare in the living room.
Reaction
One thing you can say for Terence Dudley is his Doctor Who scripts never resulted in anything boring. Bewilderingly odd - yes; stuffed with unintended subtext because of loose writing - often; operatically bonkers - sometimes. But never dull. Recently, I grappled with Black Orchid, and shortly before that Four to Doomsday. Both were peopled with characters whose motivations were completely dislocated from reality, where the plot happened in random fits and starts amidst distracting scenes unconnected to the overall thrust of the narrative. K9 and Company is reassuringly consistent: instead of the action halting for a dance or a buffet, this time it's for a discussion of market gardening (I'm undecided on whether that's better or worse). K9 and Company is probably Black Orchid's closest rival, in fact, for Doctor Who's Circus Freak story award: both provoke a guilty fascination, and give scope for almost endless unhealthy analysis. (Interestingly, Dudley's final script, The King's Demons, is a bit more coherent and sensible - he never wrote for the show again after that.)
It's not all bad, though. On the positive side, and starting right at the beginning, Ian Levine and Fiachra Trench create a sparky theme tune that contains significantly more energy than the rest of the story. The beginning credit sequence that accompanies it may be risible, but it is fun. My favourite moment is the succession of stuttering zooms towards Elizabeth Sladen perched atop a stone wall, which they just about get away with, but then it's followed - like a punch line following a feed line - by the same succession of stuttering zooms towards the same stone wall, but this time it's her co-star, a plastic prop, teetering atop there. It's howl out loud hilarious, and if you haven't ever experienced it, I recommend googling it and watching the sequence in full on youtube. But the cut from that sequence and theme to a hackneyed Junior Hammer House of Horror scene of a hooded black magic coven members chanting in the dark is such a downer that watching it you can feel the life draining out of you. It's the televisual equivalent of a slow groan.
It would be difficult not to improve from there, but it still takes a good few scenes. We see lots of dull grown-ups talking about business, but no excitement. Sladen tries to work some warmth into her performance, but it's impossible as the script depicts her as irritable from the very beginning, before she even knows there's a conspiracy; it even goes to the trouble of having other characters remarking on it a couple of times ("Don't be so touchy" for example). Brendan, played by Ian Sears, is a nice and well-acted character, but he gets very little to do. John Leeson's K9 characterisation lifts every scene he performs in, and it's a relief when the metallic mutt finally appears. But it's astonishing how few scenes our eponymous tin hero appears in after that. With a series, everyone would no doubt have settled in, they'd have worked out a way to feature K9 a bit more, and all would have been fine; but, in a one-off - as this turned out to be - the regulars do not come over as a team one would want to spend more time with.
There are a few other positives - music and sets are good throughout, for example, and the festive setting is nice. The negatives are, well, everything else; most egregious, though, is the script. Dudley is attempting the same trick he would do in Black Orchid, including tropes and images from a supernatural monster horror to spice up what is underneath just a humdrum crime story. He didn't have much choice: the scope of this pilot episode was set from the production team, and there was a strict no magic, no monsters rule. We can only speculate whether this would have been relaxed for a series, but in this pilot episode there was a challenge: do it as a straight crime investigation show and risk putting off the Doctor Who fans tuning in expecting something similar to their favourite show, or try to fudge it. Probably the latter course, although less brave, was the right one to take. But how it is handled creates problems from the off.
A large part of the early narrative is an interminable examination of the mystery of the unsent cable. Sarah Jane is worried because her aunt is not at home to meet her as planned, and didn't contact her in advance. She has supposedly left early for a lecture tour of the US; right at the start, though, we've been shown a black magic rite which included the aunt's photograph. This should be intriguing: has she come to a sticky end through the criminal or supernatural activities of a coven she had recently written about? Unfortunately, in between there's a scene of her alive and well explaining to someone that she's going to have to leave early for a lecture tour of the US! Why include that scene at all if it damages the mystery? Well, probably because the audience has no idea who she is - she's a new character, who only has relevance because she's a relative of the protagonist. The interim scene of Lavinia spouting exposition to her neighbour is needed to set all that up. Considering that the coven's ire has been stoked up by something written in a newspaper, and our protagonist is someone who writes for newspapers, it would have been surely better to start with the coven burning a photograph of Sarah Jane, then dissolve to her arriving and finding her aunt missing. You wouldn't need to feature the aunt at all until the end, and there'd be intrigue that she's been nobbled in revenge against her pesky journalist niece.
Aunt Lavinia's disappearance is a complete red herring: when we finally get an explanation of the missing cable, we find that it's because the bad guy never sent it. But why? It doesn't help the coven in any way to stir Sarah Jane's curiosity; in fact, it can only hinder them. Why not just send the cable as Lavinia asked? The only reason is to fool the audience, not fool any character. The story is full of loose ends like these. The policeman dies in what is made to look like a supernatural attack, but can't be. So, we're left with the explanation that he had a heart attack in shock when he saw a goat. It's ridiculous. If one's going to have a pretend supernatural story that turns out to have a rational explanation, the rational explanation has to be, well, rational. Scared to death by a goat?!!!! Elsewhere, the script is trying to make the Bakers look suspicious, but doesn't have anything to work with. The actors do their best to add some subtext to help this along, but that has the unfortunate side effect that Juno Baker is essentially coming on to Sarah Jane in every scene they're both in. There's a dangerous point in the middle where any older audience member can't help but believe that there's going to be the sudden inclusion of a subplot where the Bakers spike Sarah's punch, then lock her in their underground sex dungeon.
Luckily, this doesn't happen. In fact, very little happens really, once you extract all those loose ends: the coven wants revenge on Lavinia, but they don't achieve that - she's just left the country for legitimate reasons. The coven wants to silence the policeman, but they don't - he's just randomly died of a heart attack. At the end, they're just about to commit a ritual murder of a public school boy... for what reason exactly? Maybe to get back at Lavinia, maybe to make their crops grow. The script explicitly states that this isn't something they've ever done before, so why are they starting now? Members of the local community with jobs and families - and a very peculiar hobby, admittedly - suddenly want to perform a human sacrifice. There isn't even sufficient justification for one person to behave like this, let alone thirteen. It's just silly. I can much more easily believe a techno-dog from the year 5000 with a laser in his nose.
Connectivity:
It's not all bad, though. On the positive side, and starting right at the beginning, Ian Levine and Fiachra Trench create a sparky theme tune that contains significantly more energy than the rest of the story. The beginning credit sequence that accompanies it may be risible, but it is fun. My favourite moment is the succession of stuttering zooms towards Elizabeth Sladen perched atop a stone wall, which they just about get away with, but then it's followed - like a punch line following a feed line - by the same succession of stuttering zooms towards the same stone wall, but this time it's her co-star, a plastic prop, teetering atop there. It's howl out loud hilarious, and if you haven't ever experienced it, I recommend googling it and watching the sequence in full on youtube. But the cut from that sequence and theme to a hackneyed Junior Hammer House of Horror scene of a hooded black magic coven members chanting in the dark is such a downer that watching it you can feel the life draining out of you. It's the televisual equivalent of a slow groan.It would be difficult not to improve from there, but it still takes a good few scenes. We see lots of dull grown-ups talking about business, but no excitement. Sladen tries to work some warmth into her performance, but it's impossible as the script depicts her as irritable from the very beginning, before she even knows there's a conspiracy; it even goes to the trouble of having other characters remarking on it a couple of times ("Don't be so touchy" for example). Brendan, played by Ian Sears, is a nice and well-acted character, but he gets very little to do. John Leeson's K9 characterisation lifts every scene he performs in, and it's a relief when the metallic mutt finally appears. But it's astonishing how few scenes our eponymous tin hero appears in after that. With a series, everyone would no doubt have settled in, they'd have worked out a way to feature K9 a bit more, and all would have been fine; but, in a one-off - as this turned out to be - the regulars do not come over as a team one would want to spend more time with.
There are a few other positives - music and sets are good throughout, for example, and the festive setting is nice. The negatives are, well, everything else; most egregious, though, is the script. Dudley is attempting the same trick he would do in Black Orchid, including tropes and images from a supernatural monster horror to spice up what is underneath just a humdrum crime story. He didn't have much choice: the scope of this pilot episode was set from the production team, and there was a strict no magic, no monsters rule. We can only speculate whether this would have been relaxed for a series, but in this pilot episode there was a challenge: do it as a straight crime investigation show and risk putting off the Doctor Who fans tuning in expecting something similar to their favourite show, or try to fudge it. Probably the latter course, although less brave, was the right one to take. But how it is handled creates problems from the off.A large part of the early narrative is an interminable examination of the mystery of the unsent cable. Sarah Jane is worried because her aunt is not at home to meet her as planned, and didn't contact her in advance. She has supposedly left early for a lecture tour of the US; right at the start, though, we've been shown a black magic rite which included the aunt's photograph. This should be intriguing: has she come to a sticky end through the criminal or supernatural activities of a coven she had recently written about? Unfortunately, in between there's a scene of her alive and well explaining to someone that she's going to have to leave early for a lecture tour of the US! Why include that scene at all if it damages the mystery? Well, probably because the audience has no idea who she is - she's a new character, who only has relevance because she's a relative of the protagonist. The interim scene of Lavinia spouting exposition to her neighbour is needed to set all that up. Considering that the coven's ire has been stoked up by something written in a newspaper, and our protagonist is someone who writes for newspapers, it would have been surely better to start with the coven burning a photograph of Sarah Jane, then dissolve to her arriving and finding her aunt missing. You wouldn't need to feature the aunt at all until the end, and there'd be intrigue that she's been nobbled in revenge against her pesky journalist niece.
Luckily, this doesn't happen. In fact, very little happens really, once you extract all those loose ends: the coven wants revenge on Lavinia, but they don't achieve that - she's just left the country for legitimate reasons. The coven wants to silence the policeman, but they don't - he's just randomly died of a heart attack. At the end, they're just about to commit a ritual murder of a public school boy... for what reason exactly? Maybe to get back at Lavinia, maybe to make their crops grow. The script explicitly states that this isn't something they've ever done before, so why are they starting now? Members of the local community with jobs and families - and a very peculiar hobby, admittedly - suddenly want to perform a human sacrifice. There isn't even sufficient justification for one person to behave like this, let alone thirteen. It's just silly. I can much more easily believe a techno-dog from the year 5000 with a laser in his nose.
Connectivity:
Both stories see the protagonists investigating in a closed-off community which is conspiring against them, and uncover a dark secret keeping the members of that community in thrall.
Deeper Thoughts:
The history of spin. For the sake of my own sanity, I'm not proposing to cover every episode of every Doctor Who spin-off for the blog; this post can be considered a one time only experiment. Just doing all the old and new series episodes is more than enough. It's nice to have an embarrassment of riches, though. In the 1990s, when Doctor Who wasn't in production, the idea that there would be episodes produced for another fourteen years and counting would have seemed unlikely enough; telling a fan back then that, beyond that, there would be two very successful spin-offs running for many years too - as well as another slightly less successful spin-off and two factual strands about the making of the programme - you'd have been met with disbelief and derision. You wouldn't even need to wait for the 1990s, it would have seemed outlandish even in 1982, shortly after K9 and Company's broadcast, in the wake of the show's failure to get picked up for a series. It was a shame, as a sister show aimed at a younger audience in the 1980s might have helped balance things out against the main show, which had turned a bit more cult-ish and was aimed more at an older, more obsessive audience in that decade.
For all its faults, the K9 and Company format - unlike its titular hero - had legs. This is demonstrated by the success of one of those later spin offs, The Sarah Jane Adventures, which is an only very slightly retooled version of K9 and Company. The other main success, Torchwood, had early episodes every bit as ridiculous as A Girl's Best Friend, but care and attention to develop the format stabilised things, and it paid off. Even Class, the least loved of any 21st Century spin-off, got a full series. It might be fun to blame it all on the awful script for the pilot, but K9 and Company's stumble on trying to move from pilot to going concern was less about the quality and more about the powers that be at the Beeb. So, this one 50-minute episode was destined to be the only example of a Doctor Who spin-off that ever got made in the 20th Century, but that wasn't necessarily for the want of trying in earlier decades.
In the later part of the 1960s, Dalek creator Terry Nation expended a lot of energy trying to get a Doctor-less Dalek TV series off the ground, but it didn't quite make it. In 1970s, there was talk of doing a UNIT series, or a series featuring Jago and Litefoot, two large-than-life supporting characters from 1970s story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. That talk might have only been a brief conversation in the BBC bar, but it didn't stop audio company Big Finish from later creating long-running ranges based on both these ideas, as well as many more. They even did their own version of the adventures of Sarah Jane too, a few years before Elizabeth Sladen returned to play the character again on TV. This was all long after 20th Century Doctor Who finished, though. The closest there was to a spin-off in non-TV merchandise during the life of the show was a short-lived set of books on the Target imprint (home of Doctor Who novelisations) called The Companions of Doctor Who. These books were published in 1986 and 1987, but there were only three: a new adventure for Harry Sullivan, another for Turlough, and finally a novelisation of K9 and Company (Sarah Jane and her dog get everywhere!). Alas, for some reason, Terence Dudley's story of simple country folk planning to murder teenagers to improve the pH of their soil put an end to the continuing series. It seems to be good at that.
In Summary:
Great title sequence (I'm serious!); shame about the show.
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