Farewell, Sarah Jane Smith

I remember when I first saw Sarah Jane Smith. I was eight years old, and she was wearing a bright yellow mac which I suspect wasn’t even fashionable back then. But she was more than a loud rain jacket (which was gone by the end of the episode, its lurid colour burned onto my retinae for several hours afterwards); Sarah was funny, and brave, and clever. And yes, even to my pre-pubescent eyes, she was a little bit foxy. For the thirteenth or fourteenth time that year, I was in love.

Of course, Sarah Jane’s story started long before I was born. In 1974, Jon Pertwee’s time in Doctor Who was coming to a close. For the majority of his run, he had been accompanied by Katy Manning as Jo Grant, the dippy, naive UNIT agent-in-training. But Katy was leaving the series, and so the Doctor needed a new assistant for his final run of stories. Step forward Sarah Jane Smith, intrepid reporter for Metropolitan magazine.

From the outset, Smith was wildly different to her predecessor. In her first story, The Time Warrior, not only does Sarah at one point set about kidnapping the Doctor, but she also attempts to bring the Women’s Liberation movement to the Dark Ages. And she absolutely will not make the Doctor a cup of coffee, no matter how patronisingly he asks. For want of a better word, Sarah Jane Smith was a companion with balls.

Not that she really was the Doctor’s companion for much of her first series. Thanks in part to the largely Earth-based format of the Pertwee era, Sarah Jane spent three of her first five stories working independently from the Doctor and UNIT, ever in search of the next big story. Their paths kept crossing, and Sarah Jane wasn’t hesitant to approach the Doc in search of information, but Sarah was still very much her own person, doing her own thing. While Pertwee’s Doctor had acted as a father figure to Jo Grant, with Sarah Jane he was more like a kindly uncle. Though she still had much to learn, Sarah Jane was far too driven to need that same level of guidance.

It was when paired up with Tom Baker’s Doctor, though, that Sarah Jane was really allowed to shine. As the series (and the Doctor) stepped away from contemporary Earthbound stories, Sarah was able to start having fun. With a more carefree Doctor and the strait-laced Harry Sullivan in the TARDIS, Sarah was able to make mischief with one while affectionately mocking the other. Suddenly the Doctor and Sarah Jane were on the same level: that of naughty schoolchildren.

With a slight inevitability for 1970s Doctor Who, Sarah Jane did find herself placed in damsel in distress mode increasingly often, and was hypnotised or possessed more often than any other companion in the show’s history. But the strong Sarah Jane from her first story was still there in the background: this was a character who would always argue her point, and who would always pitch in whenever there was evil to be fought - witness her attacking a Krynoid with an axe in The Seeds Of Doom, or picking up a rifle in The Pyramids Of Mars.

By 1976, Sarah Jane Smith and the Doctor had become firm friends, sharing a bond just as deep as Rose or Amy have with their Doctors, if not more so. And it’s this that makes Sarah Jane’s departure at the end of The Hand Of Fear so utterly heartbreaking. There are no big bangs or sweeping orchestral pieces: just two best friends in the TARDIS, neither of them wanting to say goodbye but both of them needing to, in a beautiful scene crafted by Tom and Elisabeth themselves.

And with that, she was gone. The fact that Elisabeth Sladen’s departure was front page news at the time was a sign of just how remarkable and how loved a companion Sarah Jane Smith was, and it’s no big surprise that in 1981 producer John Nathan Turner decided to bring her back for her own spin-off series, entitled... K-9 And Company. The metal mutt had become incredibly popular with Britain’s children, so the powers that be decided to saddle Sarah Jane with her own copy so that they could investigate mysteries in the countryside together. Though the pair worked well together, it was a flawed production, and a series was never made.

Thus, Sarah Jane’s travels seemingly came to an end, bar a meaty guest appearance in The Five Doctors, and a somewhat less exciting cameo in 1993’s ill-fated EastEnders crossover Dimensions In Time. But the fans never forgot, with Sarah Jane regularly topping ‘Best Companion’ polls, and the character would live on in productions such as the 1996 direct-to-video special Downtime, the Jon Pertwee Radio 4 plays, or Big Finish’s solo range of adventures featuring the character as she solved mysteries and fought aliens in the modern day.

In 2005, Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies decided that the show’s second season would feature an episode which saw the return of an old companion - and who else could that companion be but Sarah Jane Smith?

The result was an emotional, poignant 45 minutes of television, which saw a generation of adults reduced to tears as they finally got the closure they’d been denied 29 years earlier. And it was absolutely the same Sarah Jane, as she investigated strange goings-on at a school and found herself sparring with the Doctor’s current companion. As she resolved to find a proper life for herself, with a new K-9 model in tow, fans could have been forgiven for thinking that this was a brilliant bookend to Sarah Jane’s story.

As it turned out, it was just the beginning. A whole new generation had fallen in love with Sarah Jane Smith, much as I had thirteen years earlier. With CBBC apparently pestering RTD for a children’s Doctor Who spinoff and mooting ideas such as ‘Young Who’ (no, really), he pitched them an alternative: a series which captured all of the spirit and joy of the main series, but aimed at a slightly younger audience. And its lead character? You guessed it.

Some saw the idea of a kid’s series led by a companion from the 1970s as a bit of a gamble, but with such an enduring character as Sarah Jane Smith, there was never a risk of it failing.

Unlike with K-9 And Company, Sarah was front and centre in The Sarah Jane Adventures: a pivotal cog in a hugely successful machine. We thrilled along as she stopped alien invasions. We laughed along as she tried to get to grips with motherhood. And we cried along as Sarah Jane met her dead parents, or was left heartbroken at the altar. Sarah Jane was back, and she was wonderful, adored by children and adults alike.

Sadly, as you know, the brilliant Elisabeth Sladen passed away in April this year, bringing The Sarah Jane Adventures to a tragically premature end. And if ever proof were needed of just how many children’s lives Sarah Jane had touched, the Newsround website was flooded with children’s messages, which make for as fitting a tribute as I could ever manage. Just read the comments here, and see if you can keep your eyes dry. Very few people at this site could.

But the story of Sarah Jane Smith, as we’ve been told, will never end. She lives on in the current crop of Doctor Who companions, having been the one who definitively proved that Who companions didn’t have to be subservient screamers. And she lives on in the minds of the fans, who will never forget her and her many adventures.

Thank you for everything, Sarah Jane Smith. It’ll never be goodbye. Not really.