K-9 and Company

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!

Hmm some people really have it in for K9 AND COMPANY the first - And to date - only spin off from DOCTOR WHO . I guess if there was any potential spin offs from the legendary fantasy show then two would spring to mind . The first one obviously being a series featuring the Daleks . Terry Nation actually approached American television studios in the late 1960s seeking funding for the metallic meanies but since America never experienced Dalekmania you can see why they wouldn't want to invest in a concept they have no knowledge of . It would have probably been too expensive anyway and almost certainly unfilmable . The recent series of DOCTOR WHO contained breath taking Dalek sequences but that's because television technology has moved on in the last 40 years . The other obvious spin off would have been a show featuring Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart and UNIT but again the amount of military hardware involved would probably have made it prohibitive on financial grounds ( though THE X - FILES isn't a million miles removed from this premise when you think about it ) so instead of what we might have got we ended up with a former journalist and a robotic dog !

I was never keen on K9 during the fourth Doctor's tenure . Every time Tom Baker would be chained to a wall about to be tortured you just knew that K9 was going to appear out of the shadows and shoot the villains with his blaster . So in other words he was a plot device used by very lazy writers during the poorest period of the show seen at that time . As for Sarah Jane Smith I always thought she was slightly overrated as a companion ( She wins every single poll as favourite companion ) possibly because she was the Doctor's sidekick when the show achieved its highest ratings and most critical acclaim in the mid 1970s . I guess John Nathan Turner thought he was onto a winner by resurrecting two popular companions in a pilot for a proposed series

What is very clear by watching this pilot is how self limiting the format is . It's set on present day Earth with no monsters with the villains being pagan worshipers . If it had gone to a full series we'd have seen Sarah and K9 and girlie boy Brendan tackle mad scientists and .. and .. and ... maybe they'd have brought back pagan worshipers for a rematch . Or maybe JNT could have had an alien invasion every third week to break up the monotony of mad scientists and pagan worshipers . No doubt Sarah could have tackled the aliens with her karate ( Where did she learn that ? ) and if that wasn't enough K9 could zap the aliens with his laser - As long as the aliens didn't run up a flight of stairs or hide behind a greenhouse or were able to run faster than three miles per hour .

Despite the poor format there are some good points to this pilot . It contains some impressive night filming which lends itself to some atmospheric moments such as the policeman gingerly walking down a lonely country lane and it's nowhere as badly acted as some people claim , I mean try watching some DOCTOR WHO from the mid to late 1980s to see what bad acting is . Sean Chapman as Peter Tracey has a scene where he bursts into tears of despair and I often think that crying must be difficult for an actor to portray convincingly but here Chapman manages it . I'm not saying he deserves an Oscar but think of all the scenes you've seen on television and in movies where an actor is supposed to be crying and you're asking yourself if their character is laughing or crying ? As for the really crap title sequence or more appropriately the music that goes with it blame Ian Levine , someone who would later produce records for Take That , aka Robbie Williams and those other blokes

Hardly brilliant but not as bad as some people claim K-9 AND COMPANY gets six out of ten

Spin-offs rarely get anywhere, and "K-9 and Company" is no exception. Now that I have the videotape, I've seen this. I liked it; it's very true to the spirit of "Doctor Who," with a touch of "The Avengers" thrown in. I always was a fan of both K-9 and Sarah Jane Smith; the chance to see them together was simply irresistable.

This takes the tried-and-true "Doctor Who" formula of a mysterious cult with supernatural powers terrorizing the local populace -- "Image of the Fendahl," "Masque of Mandragora," and "Stones of Blood" all toyed with this.

This one takes a more detective-like approach, and benefits well from it.

Unfortunately, I think this pilot was doomed by its opening sequence. The theme song will make you want to beat your head against the wall, because anything else is prefereable to listening to the theme. "K-9. K-9. K-9." That's the lyrics. I think this failed pilot works quite well to support my thesis that unpopular or failed spin-offs generally have really stupid theme songs, while the original show has some terribly memorable and catchy thing.

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.

So K9 was written out of Doctor Who and with the furore from the fans and the media, the producers gave him a spin off show and teamed him with Sarah Jane Smith.

It seems not much attention was paid as to who this series was aimed at. It looks like there was no type of focus group evaluation, it was just quickly green-lit into production.

The final result, a mish mash of ideas that forgot K9 was popular with kids. Therefore a witches coven story line that harks back to Pertwee era Doctor Who might not be the wisest of moves.

For years K9 & Company stuck out like a sore thumb in the Doctor Who canon. Almost a quarter of century later, Russell T Davies effectively tried a second pilot, pushing Sarah Jane to the forefront, surrounding her with some kids and K9 pushed to the background. Even the Doctor turned up a few times.

In essence this pilot provided a bridge to the Sarah Jane Adventures.