The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

Chapter the 320th, where we imbibe a little Tennant extra. 

Plot:

Sarah Jane Smith's adopted son Luke wonders what his Mum is up to after she lies about where she's going a couple of times. He has Mr. Smith the computer track her. It turns out that she's dating handsome silver fox Peter Dalton. A few weeks go by, when Luke, Clyde and Rani have to hide a few extra-terrestrial shenanigans from Peter. He then proposes, and Sarah Jane says yes. The engagement ring once on her finger seems to exert a power over her: she mothballs Mr. Smith, and focusses on the arrangements for a wedding in less than two weeks' time, rather than on saving the world. Luke is very happy, but Clyde is suspicious. He and Rani go to Peter's house and find it empty, with evidence that it has not been lived in for some time. On the day of the wedding, Clyde smuggles K9 into the venue. The guests sit, the bridal party arrives, and Sarah Jane walks to the front to join the officiating registrar and Peter. Before anyone can say 'I do', the Doctor rushes in to stop the wedding. The Trickster appears and most of the wedding party disappears. Sarah Jane and Peter are trapped in one space/time trap, the Doctor, kids and K9 in another, in the same place but stuck in a different second of time. The Trickster uses the others as hostages to coerce Sarah Jane to agree to wed Peter. This has been arranged by the Trickster to make Sarah Jane turn her back on protecting the Earth and plunge things into chaos; Peter should have died some weeks back in his home, but the Trickster intercepted him at that point; Peter thinks the Trickster is an angel and was tempted by a chance to find love. With artron energy that Clyde absorbs from the TARDIS, plus Peter's self-sacrifice, the trap is broken, and the Trickster banished.

Context:

As usual when straying a tad beyond the strict boundaries of Who canon, I asked myself a set of questions about this Sarah Jane Adventures story. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Does it have visuals? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, the decision was made to blog the story. Despite the evidence of this blog over the years making it look like I'm an obsessive completist, I have never ever purchased any of the Sarah Jane Adventures home video releases, so I had no choice but to watch this from the BBC iplayer. I couldn't interest the Better Half or the kids in such a curio, so watched it alone one afternoon towards the end of January 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Beyond the handful of blog posts like this one that cover notable spin-offs, I have completed seven Doctors' televisual eras proper (the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 33 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

2009 was Doctor Who's first so-called gap year since it had relaunched for the 21st century. The previous four years from the relaunch in 2005 onwards had each seen a full series of 13 episodes plus a Christmas special aired, but that momentum couldn't be - or at least wasn't - maintained. It later became a much less big of a deal that Doctor Who wasn't being shown much or at all in a particular year; for this first time, though, those that made the programme clearly felt they had to do something extra. At that point, of course, a couple of Doctor Who scripted spin-offs were in production (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more on this). They and the main show did a few special things to span the year, so that Who or Who-related content didn't disappear for that long: an Easter special episode of Doctor Who was shown in April, Torchwood's third series was a big event with its episodes stripped across a week of BBC1 broadcasts in July, the third season of The Sarah Jane Adventures had a guest appearance from David Tennant as the Doctor in October, then more special episodes of the main show followed in November and in the festive period at the end of the year. Broadcasting in a children's TV slot, and airing just before bigger and more memorable episodes like The Waters of Mars and The End of Time, The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith was the easiest to miss and probably the most forgettable even if you didn't miss it. I can't remember that first viewing with any clarity, but it would have likely been with the Better Half, watching the episodes from a PVR recording made while I was at work. I don't think that either of our then only two children were old enough to appreciate the show (they were three years old and two months old at the time).

Reaction:

The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is not just an example of a spin-off, but also of a slightly different beast, a crossover. This had happened in the opposite direction the previous year, with the main show featuring appearances from Sarah Jane, K9 and Luke Smith, as well as members of Torchwood, in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. There was a policy decision that the Doctor, a children's hero, would not appear in the post-watershed Torchwood, but the favour could still be returned in the other spin-off aimed at younger audiences. From viewing The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith again, it feels to me that, once the decision to feature David Tennant's Doctor in a crossover appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures had been made, nobody thought that they needed to do much more than that. The first episode is a lot of individual scenes, almost sketch-like in places, marking time until the wedding ceremony. The second is mostly just the Doctor hanging out with younger members of the cast. This becomes almost meta; in the scene towards the end, are the young characters excited to be allowed into the TARDIS, or is it that the actors are excited about visiting the set? Maybe it's a big bit of both. The script calls for Tennant only to bring his generic set of Doctor tics - rushing around, gritting his teeth, saying Allons-y, waving his sonic around, and so on - not to do anything innovative or stretching. The most fun moment for him is near the end of the first part, and must have proved irresistible for the writer: the Doctor runs in to stop the wedding (appearing for the first time after having been teased by the sound of the TARDIS popping up on the soundtrack throughout the episode leading up that point) just after the officiant has asked if anyone has just cause and impediment why these two people can't be wed, etc., etc. 

The bitty first episode is there to establish the budding relationship between Sarah Jane and her beau Peter Dalton (played by Nigel Havers who, like Tennant, is just being asked to do the thing he always tends to do with no straying outside the boundaries). To keep things engaging, there has to be some conflict, but the story can't decide at what level to pitch it. Is this a comic farce where Luke, Clyde and Rani have to prevent Peter from seeing anything extra-terrestrial that might put him off? Well, yes, every third scene is like that, including the moment that Luke pretends K9 is a high-tech toy, or the scenes with the CGI slug that Sarah Jane buys on ebay so that she can send it back to its home planet (the CGI for the creature being, alas, some of the worst ever scene in the Whoniverse). Is the conflict more at the internal or inter-personal level, where the threat of the change to their lifestyles that Sarah Jane settling down will mean causing upset to the younger regular characters? Yes, it's that too, with a couple of good scenes along those lines (Tommy Knight's slightly desperate need to have a Dad is really well-played and creates some nice moments between him and Daniel Anthony as the more suspicious Clyde). Finally, is the conflict more along the lines that there is clearly something more to this romance, and that it all could be a con? Yes, it's that too. It's difficult to reconcile these different levels of conflict in a coherent way, so the story instead just shuffles them in with one another, each new scene and the next cutting between these different approaches. It damages the romance that should be central to the piece: is it real or is it based on some hypnosis done by the Trickster?

The engagement ring glows and seems to control Sarah Jane's behaviour, confusing the issue. There's a quite nice scene with Peter reminding her that she fell in love with him before the ring went on, but is such a papering over the cracks really needed at all? The story would be much more powerful if no such glowing inducement was required, and Sarah just started to neglect her saving the world sideline as she's preoccupied with real life falling in love stuff. That would present a real sacrifice at the end, as the happiness would be genuine, but she'd nonetheless have to pass it up, as she needs to be on duty to stand up to the Trickster or baddies like him. There are a few issues with doing that plot, though. First, it wouldn't really leave room for the Doctor to return; second - and don't hate me for bringing this up, majority Doctor Who fandom, as for some reason you don't want to see this, but - Lis Sladen is too limited an actor to do emotion well enough to sell that she's really in love (sorry, but it's true); third, a straight plot would be too similar to previous Sarah Jane Adventures stories. The script already hangs a lantern on this by suggesting that this is the Trickster's M.O., but having Sarah Jane responsible for cutting short the magically extended life of someone who should be dead is exactly what happens in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? by the same author from the first series, and Sarah Jane being tempted by a situation that's contrary to the laws of time is exactly what happens in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith by the same author in the second series. Without the need to shoehorn Tennant in, it might have proved to be the emotional finish to that trilogy; but without him it would probably not be felt to be as special as it is in its final form.

Connectivity:

Both Dark Water / Death in Heaven and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith pointedly don't feature Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier; he's represented - even typing this now, I still can't fully believe it - by an extra in a Cyberman suit in the Capaldi story; for the Sarah Jane story, Courtney was unwell and couldn't be part of proceedings as originally planned, so he was written out with a line stating that the Brig is in Peru.  

Deeper Thoughts:

The Revised and Updated History of Spin. The previous time I covered a story from a Lis Sladen-starring Doctor Who spin-off featuring K9 (in this blog post from March 2019), I mused in the Deeper Thoughts section on the history of Doctor Who spin-offs. In summary, despite some ideas and attempts, the sum total of TV spin-offs in the classic era was one pilot episode that was never developed into a series. Obviously, the time wasn't right back then; it didn't take too long after the relaunch of the programme in 2005, though, for records related to Doctor Who spin-offs to be smashed again and again. From the off in March 2005, there was Doctor Who Confidential, a making-of documentary series that aired on UK channel BBC3 immediately after the latest episode of Doctor Who aired on BBC1. A year later, the launch of the second run of the relaunched series was additionally accompanied by a weekly Who-themed magazine show aimed at younger children called Totally Doctor Who. Six months after that, the first dramatic spin-off started; Torchwood, also debuting on BBC3, was aimed at a post-watershed viewing audience, and featured Captain Jack (who was in five episodes of the 2005 Doctor Who series), Tosh (who was in one episode of the 2005 series), plus a few other regulars, one played by Eve Myles (who was in one episode of the 2005 series playing a different part). Before Torchwood finished its first run, a second scripted spin-off debuted with a pilot episode, this one aimed at younger audience members. This was, of course, The Sarah Jane Adventures, featuring Sarah Jane Smith and K9 (who were both in one episode of the 2006 series, and loads of episodes in the classic era). For a short, fecund period, there were four programmes (two scripted drama, two factual) running in parallel to the main programme.

This didn't endure, but it was fun while it lasted. Totally Doctor Who ran until 2007, the other three all continued up to 2011. The Sarah Jane Adventures would have continued longer if not for the death of Lis Sladen (the team that made the show went on to create another for Children's BBC called Wizards versus Aliens to plug the gap, and that ran for three years). The main show still continued, but then found itself at the start of a long period where there were no regularly running brother or sister shows alongside it, but there were very occasional forays into the extended story universe. As part of the 50th anniversary celebrations in 2013, a docu-drama was created about the very beginning of the classic series, An Adventure in Space and Time. When Doctor Who embarked on its second gap year - with no Peter Capaldi stories bar a Christmas special airing in 2016 - there was another spin-off created and shown. This was Class, set in the Coal Hill School that had been the character Clara's workplace in the 2014 and 2015 seasons. The series focussed on a set of sixth-formers dealing with extra-terrestrial activity. It was pitched at a Young Adult audience somewhere between the ages of The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood's key demographics, a tricky set of TV viewers to reach, let alone to satisfy. Despite being the brainchild of award-winning YA author Patrick Ness, it wasn't deemed to be successful enough to get a second series. Throughout Jodie Whittaker's time as the Doctor, there were no TV spin-offs, though there was an audio drama series called Doctor Who: Redacted that ran for two series and is still available on BBC Sounds in the UK. I've still not got round to listening to it, but I will sooner or later.

There was a feeling from many fans that when Russell T Davies returned as showrunner there would be an explosion of new spin-offs. This was perhaps based on Disney+ money being involved, the streamer already hosting a plethora of shows connected to the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. Additionally, Davies had made comments stating that he felt Doctor Who should have a similar franchise presence on streaming services, with multiple spin-off shows available. Those fans waiting for a Paul McGann starring Time War series or similar are still waiting, but Davies did achieve something like what he'd suggested; he just didn't do it on Disney+. A sister making-of show in the Doctor Who Confidential mould immediately returned called Doctor Who Unleashed, with an episode created per story of the main show. There were also a couple of strands that presented classic era stories in new ways, the 'In Colour' re-imaginings of black and white stories, now colourised, plus Tales from the TARDIS. This second strand involved new material with stars of the original productions (and Daniel Anthony reprising the character as Clyde from the Sarah Jane Adventures in the one for The Three Doctors). All these new things, plus most of the stories and spin-offs from 1963 to 2022 came together as 'The Whoniverse', a section of the BBC iplayer that hosts that multi-show streaming franchise that Davies knew could exist. Most of that material can't be shown on Disney+, though, as they don't have the rights. The first spin-off they have funded is one that's currently being made, The War Between the Land and the Sea, with broadcast date unknown (though recent comments from Davies suggest it's a good way off). Whether it will be the only spin-off or the start of something bigger depends on whether Disney+ decide to continue their relationship with the BBC and Davies. Time (and money) will tell...

In Summary:

It's a fun crossover, but it's not much more than that

Dark Water / Death in Heaven

Chapter the 319th, where the afterlife attacks!

Plot:

Danny Pink dies in an accident. A grieving Clara tries to force the Doctor to go back and change time to save him. Instead, the Doctor connects her to the TARDIS telepathic circuits to materialise the ship in the most likely place to find Danny again. This is the 3W Institute, run by Missy and reportedly set up by a founder that discovered that the dead can talk to us through television static, and they are all somehow still connected to their corpses. The Doctor thinks this is all a con to prey on people's fears. The rich people's minds are uploaded to a floating hard drive, which the Doctor recognises as Time Lord tech, while their bodies are kept in protective exoskeletons. Danny finds himself in what appears to be the afterlife, where an administrator called Seb greets him. Someone else there also wants to meet him: this is a boy that Danny accidentally killed when he was a soldier. Seb asks if Danny wants to use a service they provide where they can remove his painful emotions. Too late, the Doctor realises that the 3W exoskeletons are Cybermen, and that Missy is a regenerated Master. The Cybermen emerge in the St. Paul's area, and they and the Doctor and Missy are surrounded by UNIT, led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Osgood. The Cybermen fly up to the sky and explode, forming a cloud, and rain starts to fall. This rain contains 'Cyber pollen' which turns dead people into Cybermen. In the Institute, Clara bluffs some Cybermen that she is actually the Doctor to buy some time. A rogue Cyberman arrives and takes her away.

The Doctor, Missy and the TARDIS are put aboard a UNIT plane, but flying Cybermen attack it in the air. Missy kills Osgood. Kate falls from the plane. As if that's not bad enough, a UNIT character played by the wonderful and talented Sanjeev Bhaskar is criminally underused before he too is killed off. The Doctor skydives from the plane, catching up with and entering the falling TARDIS. He materialises near Clara in a graveyard where many Cybermen are coming to life. The rogue Cyberman turns out to be Danny Pink. Missy arrives and tells the Doctor that the Cyber-rain will fall again, converting all the living people. She offers the Cyber-army to the Doctor, thinking that his self-righteousness will make him accept and the power will corrupt him. The Doctor refuses, and passes the control bracelet for the Cybermen that Missy has given him to Danny. Danny leads the Cybermen to fly up and destroy the clouds. Missy is shot by another Cyberman that turns out to be a reanimated dead Brigadier, who had previously caught and saved Kate when she fell from the plane. The bracelet allows Danny to bring back to life the boy he killed, who arrives in Clara's home. The Doctor uses coordinates that Missy gave him hoping to find the missing Gallifrey, but there's nothing there. He visits Clara, and both of them lie thinking that they need to protect the other's happiness (the Doctor thinks Clara is reunited with Danny, she thinks he's been reunited with his people). She stays on Earth; in the TARDIS, the Doctor is surprised to find Santa Claus knocking on the door, telling him he can't leave things that way.

Context:

This was viewed from the BBC iplayer in mid-January 2025, the first and second episode separated by a couple of days. For the first episode I was accompanied by all the children (young man of 18, boy of 15, girl of 12). The eldest was home for the last day before returning to university, and he was only interested to see Chris Addison playing Seb in the story, as he's a big fan of The Thick of It. He was a little disappointed that Addison didn't share any scenes with Capaldi (the scenes in the aforementioned comedy where Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker and Addison's Olly Reader interact are many and celebrated). There was a surprising amount of enthusiasm from the younger two to keep going and watch the second part immediately after the cliffhanger, but I didn't have the time at that moment. When I did, their enthusiasm had waned and I watched the second part alone. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era; Peter Capaldi's twelfth Doctor joining the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh and fourteenth, making seven Doctors completed to date. This also marks the completion of another season making it 33 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

Early November 2014, just over ten years before the recent rewatch, I saw these episodes when they were first broadcast on BBC1 in the UK. The pattern of the time was to timeshift each episode a little, watching it later on during the Saturday evening after it had gone out, accompanied by the Better Half. If we both thought an episode was suitable for the children, whose ages ranged from 2 to 8 years old at the time, I would watch it with them the following Sunday morning. Capaldi's first year had proved more scary than any season before, at least in our assessment, and three of its stories had been held back from the children; the two-part finale, though, was not one of those stories, despite some questionable moments that I'll pick up on in the Reaction section below.

Reaction:

In a scene in Dark Water, the 'three words', hinted about in the name of the institute around which a lot of the action revolves, are revealed. The words are 'Don't cremate me' and they are cried out in anguish by the supposed voices of the dead picked up from the ether. It's played realistically, and is therefore quite a chilling scene. I could see how another parent or child would react differently to how my children and I did on first watch. The Doctor has some dialogue to state that it's all a con, that there is no link between the corpses of the dead and any continuing spirit or soul; it's quick and easy to miss, though. Elsewhere, Danny Pink's spirit / soul is visually depicted. The script suggests - to those that can follow the technical bafflegab - that it's actually a computer simulation of him based on his memories; but the visual, scene after scene, is him walking around in an afterlife. This overpowers any technicalities: the story is weighted heavily - in some places, pretty much explicitly - towards a suggestion that people live on in some way after they die, in pain. There's multiple references to Danny's feeling cold, and this is stated to be because his corpse is still linked to him somehow, and it's being kept somewhere cold. That's quite an unsettling thing to suggest to younger members of the audience, and the programme fumbles the scientific explanation that may provide reassurance. Danny Pink, dead or alive, is never shown to be connected to any futuristic computer or such. He just magically appears in what is presented as an afterlife, but is actually - we find out later - some form of cyberspace. In the first episode, the Doctor says "We're here to get your boyfriend back from the dead", so he must believe it is possible in some way (though he has no knowledge of the use of the nethersphere tech at that point).

Why do the minds that have been uploaded to the nethersphere need to have a virtual afterlife to exist in, anyway? If all they are planned to be is the consciousness of an army of Cybermen, then can't they be put on standby until they're required to rampage? Would Missy really need anyone's consent to remove their emotions? She has a computer that stores dead people's brains, she can edit them to her two hearts' content. Why would she need to provide afterlife aftercare, and subtle manipulation, in the form of Seb? It makes sense that Missy is amassing an army of Cybermen by using fear to drum up trade for the 3W Institute. It makes sense that a rich punter might arrange before they die for their brain to be uploaded into her nethersphere, and their body to be put in a Cyber-suit / exoskeleton, based on their fear of the three words con. It doesn't make sense, though, that elsewhere Missy's shown as perfectly able to upload anyone to the nethersphere, whether they've engaged the Institute or not. it doesn't really make sense that loads of bodies in graves are converted into Cybermen by magic rain. The 'Cyber pollen' could contain the instructions for creating a new Cyberman, but where's it getting the raw materials? This is science an order of magnitude more advanced than that seen in the 3W Institute, which makes a mockery of the idea that Missy needed all those old, rich millionaires' money to fund her research. With only the slightest thought, it becomes clear that the story doesn't need the Institute front at all. It could be one episode long and start with Missy using some Gallifreyan tech to make people rise up out of their graves. The Cybermen reanimating dead bodies is, after all, a great idea, and enough to sustain a story on its own.

Without the nethersphere stuff, we would lose the subplot about Danny Pink's death, and that allows for some emotionally rich material. The sequence of Clara threatening the Doctor, urging him to go back and change time to save Danny, is one of the best of this period: it involves wonderful performances and great visuals, playing out near an active volcano; it has a great reversal, and ends with the killer line of the Doctor's "Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?" The story also wouldn't have its ending. Putting aside the monumental silliness that Missy has done this whole convoluted global plan just to make a rhetorical point about the Doctor's capacity to become a dictator, the scenes where Danny's humanity and love for Clara overrides Cyber programming and he saves the day are very satisfying. The Doctor realising that he himself is not a bad man, just an "idiot" trying to make things better does tie together the themes of the season as a whole (just about). In the slightly overlong coda, though, all the earlier issues with Doctor Who establishing an essentially real in-universe afterlife are brought back again. The bracelet that Missy's used to travel back and forth to the cyberspace realm allows someone who has been dead to come back to life. But Missy had a living body when she used the bracelet. When the boy is brought back at the end, where's his body come from? Only his dead mind was in the nethersphere, and he's been dead a long time. Also, how's Clara going to track down his parents, and how on Earth are they going to react? Worse than all that, though, is the implicit endorsement of the earlier idea that if you cremate your loved ones they can feel it. It's grim, as well as confusing. Sometimes fewer ideas work better.

If one can manage to switch one's brain off, though, the story is very enjoyable. There are some great action scenes like the Cybermen recreating the classic scene of them stomping around near St. Paul's Cathedral, then surprising everyone watching by zooming into the sky, newly able to fly. The reveal of Michelle Gomez's Missy as a regenerated Master is lots of fun, and her manic, murderous scenes throughout work well. Poor Osgood is given hope in the middle of an episode by the Doctor that she can join him as a companion, which the savvy audience member will know is a surefire sign that she won't make it to the end credits. Jenna Coleman as Clara has some great material. The character shows wonderful chutzpah in playing for time with the Cybermen after the cliffhanger, pretending to be the Doctor. The decision to reverse the order of the names in the second episode's beginning title sequence and show Clara's eyes rather then the Doctor's takes it too far though, another example of a bad habit of writer and producer Steven Moffat's where he pretends there's a big twist when there isn't. The action, and some creepy horror scenes like Cyber hands emerging through the earth of graves, are well realised by director Rachel Talalay and it's no surprise watching this story that she was invited back to do every Capaldi season finale thereafter. She handles the emotional scenes well too, as in the moment at the end where the Doctor and Clara part with an awkward hug, both lying to the other about how well they are doing. Towards the end there's another moment that is of dubious taste. The beloved character of the Brigadier is brought back from the dead. Long term viewers are forced to imagine that Nicholas Courtney, who had died a few years before this story, is a corpse encased in one of Doctor Who's ultimate evil baddies. Even with the character, as with Danny Pink, overriding Cyber-programming and helping to save the day, it's still a bit icky. (But, then, what do I know? See the Deeper Thoughts section below for more musings on that theme.)

Connectivity:

Both Joy to the World and Dark Water / Death in Heaven are Steven Moffat penned Doctor Who stories that boldly (inadvisably?) touch on religious topics (the star of Bethlehem, the afterlife). Additionally, there's a lone Silurian working in the time hotel in the Christmas story, and it is established by later stories that the version of Osgood seen in Dark Water / Death in Heaven might be a disguised Zygon; so, both stories potentially feature friendly single members of classic series monsters with jobs. There's also a festive connection, with Santa Claus appearing in the very final moments of Death in Heaven, as a lead in to that year's Christmas special, Last Christmas, also written by Moffat.

Deeper Thoughts:

Going too far? A rant about Mary Whitehouse. Dark Water / Death in Heaven has one or maybe two moments that in my opinion went too far; that is to say, they went beyond my own personal perception of what is acceptable for a family audience. As mentioned above, I nonetheless thought it would be okay for my young children to view it. When their impressionable young minds first engaged with the material, they immediately started imitating what they saw, setting up their own company to facilitate an alien invasion by preying on people's fears about death. No, of course they didn't, and yes I'm being flippant and glib. An underlying point remains, though: what standards of acceptability do we apply to TV drama, and who am I - who is anyone? - to enforce them for anyone except themself (or perhaps for their kids, if they have parental responsibility). Everyone - adult or child - is different. It seems very presumptuous to speak for a wider audience even just about the qualities of a particular piece; to go beyond that and try to dictate what can or can't be shown, or who can or can't see it, takes that presumption and compounds it. Some people have no qualms with taking presumption and raising it to a higher power. One such person, who many a Doctor Who fan knows too well, was Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse was a political lobbyist in the UK who focussed on media standards related to obscenity and the depiction of violence. She was active from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, and during that time Doctor Who occasionally became the subject of her activism (because of depictions of violence, not - as far as I'm aware - anything related to hanky-panky in the TARDIS). The most high profile Who-related incident was her complaint about the cliffhanger ending to The Deadly Assassin's third episode, where she succeeded in getting the BBC to re-edit the sequence for future repeats.

I will reiterate my description of Whitehouse as a lobbyist and activist; that was what she was. She was not an ordinary member of the viewing public just doing her small bit out of a feeling of duty. Many people might have thought it was useful to style her as such, but it was patently not true. She called her organisation the National Viewers and Listeners Association, but it was not representative of the average viewer or listener of the nation - she no doubt spoke for some people, but they were a special interest group with views that could be described as extreme. And she was very successful. If one is tempted to see that as a positive thing, one should ask oneself whether there are any other successful lobbyists one feels good enough about to champion. As a calling, lobbyism is not one that is usually acclaimed; but, maybe - as is said of dirty work - somebody has to do it. Whitehouse played a significant part in the creation of a couple of pieces of UK legislation that most people would find unquestionably good, the Protection of Children Act 1977 and the Indecent Displays Act of 1981. She also believed that homosexuality was a perversion, and used legal processes to persecute individuals. The most egregious example of the latter was the case that she instigated concerning a play put on at the National Theatre, The Romans in Britain. The play included a scene of a simulated male-on-male rape, which Whitehouse took objection to (after it had been reported to her - she never saw the play, indeed she refused to ever see it). When they could not make a case for this being an obscenity, Whitehouse and her counsel brought private prosecution against the play's director Michael Bogdanov based on an offence under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, based on what was shown on stage amounting to his "procuring an act of gross indecency".

This case is covered well by a BBC radio documentary called 'Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse' first broadcast in 2022 that is still available in the UK at the time of writing, on the BBC Sounds app. It was produced by Simon and Thomas Guerrier (Simon blogs about it here) who have both worked on many Doctor Who projects of different kinds over the years. Linked from that blog post is another blog post by another Doctor Who commentator Jonathan Morris, reproducing the text of an article he wrote for Doctor Who Magazine in 2003. I remember encountering both when they first were available, and bristling that both seemed to be attempting to rehabilitate Whitehouse's reputation with Doctor Who fans. Perhaps aptly, or perhaps ironically, this offended my moral sensibilities. Whitehouse put Michael Bogdanov through hell just for directing a play that she didn't like. Whitehouse's counsel gave up the prosecution after three days of the trial, and she ended up liable for Bogdanov's legal costs. Whitehouse spun this as being done as a kindness, not having wanted to criminalise him at all, just wanting to establish that the Sexual Offences act applied to the theatre. I don't believe that; I believe that the case was abandoned as they suspected they weren't going to win. I also don't think the behaviour towards Bogdanov was very Christian. I feel sure that Whitehouse believed it was Christian, though. She had embarked on a previous case against Gay News, who had offended Whitehouse by publishing a poem that she thought was blasphemous, because in her words "I simply had to protect our lord". To my mind, this is not a healthy or proportionate attitude for anyone to have.

In many years of study, nobody has ever demonstrated conclusively that violent or sexual media content influences long-term behaviour, and some people have really tried hard to make that stick. Of course, someone who's just been to their Gran's cremation might get triggered by Dark Water / Death in Heaven's scene of (fake) voices from a hellish afterlife, but you can't write drama - or define laws - based on not offending anyone no matter what's going on in their circumstances. My kids were young at the time I gauged the story's acceptability; some of them understood exactly what the ramifications of the voices scene were, meaning they were mature enough to handle it; some did not, and it sailed right over their heads. This is mostly how it works in my experience. Guerrier in his blog picks out a scene in The Crusade, which hints that characters may need to kill themselves to avoid a fate worse than death if they're caught; he believes it may be something that wouldn't be shown in a family drama today. There's nothing graphic or even spelt out in the scene, though, so I think it would self-correct in the same way; if you understand, you accept; if you don't, it won't disturb. Morris thinks that 1970s Who had only itself to blame for getting Whitehouse's attention, because it pushed at the boundaries of the BBC's guidelines of the time, and maybe overstepped the mark occasionally. But how else do guidelines ever adapt? Tom Baker stories look tame compared to TV now. Doctor Who is self-evidently not responsible for any criminally violent behaviour; violence is much more complex than that, and pretending otherwise is usually a sign of a hidden agenda (like the promoting of a radically conservative interpretation of Christianity, for example).

Mary Whitehouse's crusading zeal undermined itself. Her low threshold for offence meant that she searched everywhere for obscenity and found it. This made her definition of the obscene so broad and indiscriminate that she bracketed together homosexuals with paedophiles, Doctor Who cliffhangers with porno mags in newsagents. This was shameful, and undoubtedly harmful. The poisonous legacy of that overshadows any potential good she may have contributed along the way, its radioactive half life so long that I feel any attempt at rehabilitating her should not be happening now, or at any point during my lifetime. There's also a hollow irony in Whitehouse's association with John Smyth. He was the lawyer that had worked with her on a number of cases, including initially on The Romans in Britain prosecution. The late Smyth, who died in 2018, was the serial abuser of children central to the former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby's decision to resign his position towards the end of 2024 (Welby accepted that he had not done enough to ensure that the details of the abuse were communicated widely enough, and appropriate action taken, when he first became aware of the situation in 2013). Whitehouse saw threats to children everywhere except in someone close to her. The radio documentary speculates that, had she found out during her lifetime, it might have fundamentally changed her outlook. I don't think I can find enough charity in my heart to agree, but here's a thought: rather than my getting angry or offended about a piece of media I don't agree with, or trying to supress it, why don't I instead encourage you to listen to it? You could also read the blog posts linked above. Then, make up your own mind. That isn't so hard, is it?!!

In Summary:

If you can switch off your brain, and your sense of decorum, its a fun and emotional season finale.