K-9 and Company

I think K-9 and Company was a good idea,and Elisabeth Sladen always gives a great performance although Sarah-Jane seems a bit more grumpy than her normal self in this spin-off. John Lesson's voice gives K-9 a life of his own and he makes K-9 very endearing,the opening credits are very bizarre and I am sure not meant to be as funny as they come across. Thngs do seem to take a long time to start,there is a lot of running around until Sarah-Jane opens the box containing K-9. Having recently saw the pilot of The Sarah-Jane adventures,at least K-9 and company wasn't full of annoying kids! and people overacting. It was a good idea,it wasn't a failure,it got respectful viewing figures and K-9 remains a very popular character of DR.Who even today.

After wading through several ideas for Doctor Who's one `official' spin-off (including a UNIT series I believe), John Nathan-Turner decided to base a series on K9. After all, there were times when the metal dog had received more fan mail than Tom Baker.

In short, the pilot episode has an older and wiser Sarah Jane Smith returning to her home village. She finds a box that the Doctor sent her years ago containing K9 Mark 3. Being the nosy investigative journalist she is, Sarah Jane soon become involved in stopping the activities of a coven of witches. Thank goodness she has K9 and her geeky cousin Brendan helping her.

It doesn't look promising from the first second of the theme song (something I'm sure Nathan-Turner wrote during lunch one day), and the plot is not all that engaging. In fact, there are times it seems you're watching bits of some of the Earthbound Doctor Who episodes cobbled together. Perhaps because of these factors, K9 & Company didn't make it to Episode 2.

For completists only.

Most of the other reviewers here can't seem to get past the theme song--yeah, it's silly but hardly something you would want to commit suicide over! The producer John Nathan Turner wanted a Hart To Hart opening credit sequence and that was a bit of a bad idea considering that the two leads in this are a woman and a mechanical dog! However, there is something bizarrely funny about it that acually draws you in. Maybe it's the camera zooming in on K-9 sitting on a stone fence--just how the hell did he get up there?! All of that aside, the actual story of witchcraft in the English countryside is rather fun stuff. There is some nice nightime atmosphere surrounding the coven's ceremonies and the actors who portray the various locals are all well cast. The only real negative is the short running time which is why there is not a lot of tension built. If one reads the novel it can be seen there was much more going on in the background to create tension but this does an acceptable job. Anyone who takes this too seriously or gets mad over this needs to relax and take a few deep breaths. This is great fun in the solid tradition of Doctor Who and it is too bad it never became a series.

If one can get past the jarring credit sequence and theme tune(a guilty pleasure of mine, I must confess!)this is a fun special updating us on what's happened to our beloved Sarah Jane Smith(Elizabeth Sladen) since she left the fourth Doctor at the end of 'The Hand Of Fear'.

She has gotten on with her life, and is visiting her aunt's home at Christmastime, when she gets involved in a witch cult of all things, but the unexpected discovery of a forgotten crate(a gift from the Doctor) brings welcome help in the form of K-9 Mark III(voiced by John Leeson), the lovable robotic dog from the series, which arrived in the Tardis after Sarah's time.

The only official spin-off from the classic series is most enjoyable!

John Nathan-Turner's time as producer of Dr Who (1980-9) was a frightful mess. Clearly out of his depth, his period at the helm was characterised largely by thrashing around with gimmicks to compensate for small budgets, miscasting, poor scripting and uncertainties of tone, whose accumulation had begun during Graham William's tenure, but which accelerated dramatically from Nathan-Turner's first season (season 18) onwards.

One problem that Nathan-Turner faced was that the audience was ageing, and sci-fi nerds were beginning to define the show to the detriment of its universal qualities. It was therefore potentially a shrewd move to develop the one-off TV movie K9 and Company, coupling Dr Who's favourite companion, Sarah Jane, who still lingered in the memory, with his most asinine, for younger viewers. If this reached fruition as a series, maybe a new younger audience could be cultivated?

Of course, he muffed it. The filming does not appear to have been a happy experience, at least for Elisabeth Sladen, according to her memoirs. But the appalling script, the embarrassing public school nephew Brendan, the weedy attacker Peter, a goodly set of well-known character actors reduced to oo-arrr dialogue, and a set of unintentionally comic pagans all combine to kill it anyway. The wonderful support actress Mary Wimbush is particularly wasted. The execrable title sequence is a microcosm of the failure of the whole enterprise.

Lots of people watched it; I was one of them. I wanted to love it, especially as it came shortly after the very disappointing season 18. I hated it. I assumed I was just growing too big for Dr Who, but, now we can watch these shows again on DVD, it is clear that Dr Who was leaving its audience, not the other way round.