I was browsing through some 'entertainment industry' profiles the other day chasing up info on the careers of some people who I see little of these days. (I actually found some 'original' footage of the Quatermass Experiment !). It is a sadness that some people from my past are falling like flies.

Just after coming to terms with no more 'Colonel' on Dr Who, whose demise was so sensitively told on you tube ( I posted it here), now we have Sarah Jane gone from our lives.

Sarah Jane was 'old school'. The sort of woman one could actually like, and miss. Her 'breed' of English woman has virtually disappeared. She was an early Dr Who companion who left an indelible and attractive mark, so ruthlessly whacked by a legion of wannabee Doctorettes that followed her, notably the horrid Donna Noble. ( I excuse the current 'Pond' who is a honey, and 'Rose' who is eminently shaggable. River Song could warm my bed, too).

But the squeaky clean, upright and courageous Sarah Jane was the ideal companion to show the children what a real 'nice' woman was like. Or used to be.

Others, it seems miss her too.

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http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts-and-culture/featured/6915838/farewell-sarah-jane-.thtml

There’s a brilliant moment in the1975 Doctor Who storyline The Ark In Space when Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen),on a vital mission to save Earth from the evil insectoid Wirrn, gets stuck in aventilator shaft. The Doctor (Tom Baker) hits on the ingenious ruse of goadingher across the last few inches by telling her how thoroughly useless she is.

At least, brilliant is how Iremember it being when I saw it aged ten. I remember empathising hugely withSladen’s white fury over the grotesque unfairness of the Doctor’s insults (God,kids are good at identifying unfairness: it’s almost their raison d’être) butalso I remember thinking how incredibly clever the Doctor was. You could tellit was just a ruse because of his conspiratorial grin and his half glancetowards the camera, almost as if he were aware of you at home watching him.

The other day — 36 years on — Iwatched the same scene again with Boy and Girl on a CBBC special called MySarah Jane. It was a terribly sad occasion because the programme was a shorttribute to Elisabeth Sladen, best loved of all the Doctor Who assistants, whodied last month of cancer aged just 65.

And I’m really not normallyaffected in this way by the deaths of TV personalities. But Sarah Jane wasspecial because of the double impact she had on the lives of my generation —first in her chastely fanciable, older woman role as Jon Pertwee’s and then TomBaker’s game but much put-upon assistant; subsequently, in her surrogate-motherrole when she made a surprise return to TV, entertaining my generation’soffspring in the marvellous Doctor Who spin-off series The Sarah JaneAdventures.


Like my kids I loved The SarahJane Adventures. In fact, I think I preferred it to the new Doctor Who. Theproblem with the new Doctor Who is that it has been freighted from the off withso much baggage: from Christopher Eccleston to David Tennant to Matt Smith eachactor has striven far too showily to make the role distinctively his own; and —as I’ve grumbled many times before — it sometimes feels like a high-budgetversion of those ghastly PSHE classes kids are forced to do at state school (‘Imust always wash my hands after doing a poo,’ ‘I must love aliens like mybrother because even though they may look evil and ugly and as if they are tryingto destroy the earth it will always turn out that they are much misunderstoodand have hearts of gold’).

There was little of that nonsensewith Sarah Jane. Sure, there was a hint of tokenism in the junior casting (oneblack, one white, one Asian), but that was about its only concession to themodern era. The values of Sarah Jane were the same solidly bourgeois values youwould have found in, say, Blue Peter circa 1970: the kind of values that wouldgive the BBC1’s groovy, stubbly new north-London-public-schoolie controllerDanny Cohen kittens and nightmares because they’re just not relevant or in anyway meaningful to a war-damaged eight-year-old Somali kid on a south Londoncrack estate.

Setting the tone for all thisfragrant, bourgeois, leafily suburban yumminess was the fragrant, bourgeois,leafily suburban and still very yummy Sarah Jane: attractive, well-spoken,gentle but tough when she needed to be with any alien life forms that got outof hand. You felt very happy to leave your children in her care: though she hada pretty nifty home computer (voiced by pukka Armstrong out of Armstrong andMiller: that’s how posh she was) and some handy gadgets (including soniclipstick), you knew she was the type who’d have them reading books rather thanplaying computer games.



Yet the adventures she and heryoung helpers had were often quite astonishingly scary (and often impressivelysophisticated) for children’s teatime TV, especially the ones involving theterrifying Trickster. The Trickster has a pallid face with skinned-over socketswhere the eyes should be, no nose and horrid, pointed, shark-like teeth in hisslash of a mouth. Usually, he appears — like Death — in a sinister monkishcowl. He is the creature of your nightmares. My nightmares, anyway.

And now — as unexpectedly as shecame — Sarah Jane is gone and children’s TV will never be quite the same again.It wouldn’t be fair to say that all children’s TV is rubbish: there’s actuallyan awful lot of good stuff around from the various adventures of Dick & Domto The House of Anubis to Horrible Histories. Even so, at its best The SarahJane Adventures stood out as something truly remarkable: a throwback to an ageyou thought had vanished years ago, in which it wasn’t thought embarrassing forpolite, well-scrubbed children to enjoy perilous adventures with amiddle-class, educated white woman of a certain age, unconstrained by healthand safety, eco-consciousness, or any manner of socio-political worthiness, andwhere the idea of a happy ending is to return safely to your cosy bourgeoissuburb just in time for tea.

Goodbye, Sarah Jane! We shallmiss you awfully.
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