Me and Sarah Jane: An investigation into my opinion of Doctor Who's favourite companion

I grew up with Ace as the Doctor’s companion. She was the reason I started watching the series as I had a bit of a crush on Sophie Aldred when she started presenting children’s educational series ‘Corners’ – a programme for kids much younger than I was, but it was on at the same time that I got home from school and, on the cusp of puberty, seeing this attractive young woman who told us about interesting stuff… well…

My mate told me to watch that evening’s episode of ‘Doctor Who’ on the 23^rd of November 1987. He didn’t explain why, just told me to watch it. I’d never been too interested in the show. A few weeks earlier I’d caught the scene of the Yellow Kang getting killed in ‘Paradise Towers’ and I remember watching Peri getting gunned down outside the weapons silo the previous year (and assumed for a long time that that was how she died – in fact, for the next few years I was convinced that most companions departed the series in a hail of bullets and that Mel’s sweet farewell had been the exception), but the series had never really appealed to me. That evening I immediately recognised the off-screen voice of Iceworld’s resident waitress before Sophie Aldred turned up at the Doctor and Mel’s table, and the next day at school Jon, grinning, told me that not only was she in this story but she was also the new companion. From that day I was hooked.

It was probably the best time to start watching the show, but also the worst. The next two years would see the series go from strength to strength with eight of the best serials of the Eighties giving us a darker, more mysterious Doctor and a feisty, layered companion with a developing backstory. Since I’d never watched a full serial prior to ‘Dragonfire’, I thought that this was the norm. I spent those years thrilled by Daleks and Cybermen, terrified by killer clowns, convinced Ace would die at the hands of the Happiness Patrol (while I was holidaying in Majorca, Part One was the only episode I missed seeing and I didn’t expect Ace to survive until the end of Part Three). There were demons and Queens, angels and Victorian horrors, vampires and killer cats (and some bloke Jon reliably informed me was the Doctor’s arch nemesis) and all through this were the Doctor and Ace fighting for what was right, saving the universe time and again.

And then it stopped.

The 90s saw the adventures continue with novels and in comic strips in Doctor Who Magazine. It wasn’t the same, but by this point Jon had started lending me his videos, and in 1992 the release of an extended cut of ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ saw me start my own collection. Then my gran gave us her satellite TV when she went into a care home and there were the repeats on UK Gold which I’d record onto VHS and, when I went to University, my dad would record and send to me. Discovering the old episodes was interesting, if nothing else. I’d devoured the likes of Jean-Marc Lofficier’s ‘The Terrestrial Index’ and read Doctor Who Magazine from cover to cover every four weeks from mid-1992 onwards, so I knew a little about the show and was party to all the received ‘wisdom’. Watching the old episodes was interesting and revealing. A lot of what I’d read was pretty accurate, but seeing the stories for myself allowed me to develop my own opinions, and some of these were in stark contrast to what ‘fandom’ claimed.

One of the incontrovertible truths of ‘Doctor Who’ was that Tom Baker was the Best Doctor Ever, and Sarah Jane Smith was the Best Ever Companion. I saw much of the Baker and Pertwee era out of order and whilst the stories featuring the Fourth Doctor and Sarah were usually pretty good, I didn’t really agree. I mean, Sarah was okay, but she was a bit feeble and didn’t often do much but get into trouble. And Tom was good, but also slightly over the top at times and too grandiose with his theatrical performances; an actor who had been given a subtlety bypass. I didn’t like Pertwee – too pompous, and Jo was annoying. Peter Davison was better, and I liked Adric and Nyssa (although Nyssa didn’t do much) and Tegan was okay for a while but quickly became irritating with her constant complaining. The Sixth Doctor and Peri were an interesting, if garish, combination but none of them really compared to the Seventh Doctor and Ace. And it all seemed to come back to the fact that the Fourth Doctor and Sarah were regarded as the pinnacle of main cast combinations. It was something I just didn’t see.

Towards the end of the 90s I got to see more of the first two Doctors’ adventures and developed an appreciation of the Black and White era. By the turn of the century I’d collected pretty much every story in one format or another. I had the audio releases of the missing adventures, the VHS releases of the 60s serials and many from the 70s and 80s, and those which I didn’t have on purchased video I had recorded off TV. Plus, by this point serials had started to come out on DVD. So in 2003, as the 40^th Anniversary approached, I realised that I’d be able to watch or listen to every episode in order from the very beginning, and I could do this exactly 40 years to the day, even the hour, from the original transmission. It was an interesting idea, and one which I felt would give me an insight into one of my favourite TV shows. It might even change my opinion of some of the stories, some of the Doctors and some of the Companions! So on the 23^rd of November 2003, I watched the very first episode with no idea how long I’d keep this marathon up for and no idea how interesting it might be.

One of the things I hoped to find out was why Sarah Jane Smith was so popular. At this point I was neither here nor there with the character. She was better than Victoria or Susan or Jo, but I preferred Ace and Leela and Zoe. Over the next few years my opinion of one of these characters would change drastically. In 2011, the arrival of Jo Grant and the turn from gritty drama to family viewing entirely took me by surprise – I was actually really enjoying the Pertwee era, and by June 2013 I’d watched Josephine Grant grow as a person and depart the series in one of the most emotional scenes the programme had seen. December would see a new companion arrive and I hoped that my indifferent feelings towards her would see as much a change as my feelings about Jo.

I would love for this to have a happy ending. I’d love to be able to say that between December 2013 and October 2016 my eyes were opened and I suddenly realised why so many Doctor Who Fans loved Sarah Jane Smith. I’d be very happy if the character had gone up in my estimations. The best I can do, however, is say that during this period I found I no longer felt indifferent about her.

In her first few stories, Sarah Jane Smith is set up as a very different companion to her predecessor. She’s older and more forthright with her opinions; she’s a career woman and exhibits all the qualities of a good journalist; she’s a vocal feminist and not afraid to push to get a story, to find things out. Having her immediately suspicious of the Doctor in ‘The Time Warrior’ was a great way to introduce her, and ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’ makes excellent use of her vocation. She’s let down a bit by Terry Nation (most companions were), but she puts up a decent fight against the Exxilons in the TARDIS – possibly more than decent; I’d perhaps go so far as to say unnecessarily brutal! By the time she and the Brigadier were witnessing the Doctor regenerate on the UNIT Lab floor she’d proved herself to be a great companion in the Earth-based stories but a little out of her depth when visiting other planets. She wasn’t as likeable as Jo, but she was harder.

I won’t go into how disappointing I found Tom Baker’s first story (that can be found elsewhere on my blog), but the script did Sarah very few favours. Again in a position to utilise her journalistic skills, her scenes with the members of Think Tank leave you wondering exactly how she manages to get a story if her diplomatic skills are so awful! I understand that Terrance Dicks thought it would be interesting to have self-professed Feminist Sarah mistake Jellico as the society’s head and not Miss Winters, and it does layer her character by showing that even she isn’t immune to making gender-based assumptions. But it also makes her look a little stupid; why hadn’t she bothered to find out who the Head of Think Tank was before arriving? And why is she so incredibly rude to them? It’s almost as if she knows they’re the bad guys, but it certainly isn’t the way to get information out of them. It’s unsurprising that Miss Winters treats her so contemptuously when she breaks in to sneak a look at the K1 Robot. She also seems to lose interest in the Doctor for an inordinate amount of time and seems entirely unconcerned that this man who showed her around the universe and died right in front of her only to change form right before her eyes might still be ill in the UNIT infirmary. Polly and Ben’s reactions were far better written, and I know it’s all down to the script but it’s another notch against the character.

To be fair, once Harry is on board Sarah is more likeable, but she still has a habit of complaining and coming across as a bit feeble a lot of the time. As great a story as ‘The Ark In Space’ is, she does spend most of it being decidedly negative about everything, culminating in the scene where the Doctor has to be mean to her to get her to crawl the last few feet through an air vent. I want to sympathise with her, but she volunteered. I really wouldn’t have blamed the Doctor if he’d been serious with what he said!

And don’t get me wrong. Sarah has some good scenes, and Robert Banks Stewart writes for her better than any other on the show. ‘Terror Of The Zygons’ and ‘The Seeds Of Doom’ show us a Sarah Jane who’s independent and headstrong without the whinging. And the Fourth Doctor, Sarah and Harry are a great team, but Harry is the lynchpin – he diffuses Sarah’s negative side with humour and plays an excellent foil for the Doctor. Once he’s gone the relationship between the Doctor and Sarah is, I’m sorry to say, just a little bit drab.

It’s commonly accepted that the Doctor and Sarah have an incredible on-screen chemistry. They’re best friends exploring the universe together. So why don’t I see it? It’s something that’s often pointed out and yet, to me, it isn’t there. There’s very little witty banter, there’s not much sense of fun, there’s the obvious fact that they care about what happens to each other, but there’s nothing noticeably special about their relationship. It doesn’t compare to what would be seen with Leela and the second Romana. Even Adric had a student/mentor relationship with the Doctor which was more interesting. The Fourth Doctor and Sarah, without Harry, seem to have a friendly yet slightly detached relationship. They’re friends, but friends who could easily walk away from each other, which is what eventually happens – in those final minutes of ‘The Hand Of Fear’, with their perfunctory goodbyes, there doesn’t seem to be much emotion. The Doctor tells Sarah she has to go, she accepts it and steps out somewhere on present-day Earth (Aberdeen, apparently). By this point in the series, I was glad to see her go!

This leaves me with the question as to why she’s so popular and why I can't understand it. In many of the serials from Season 13 I find her quite annoying, regularly complaining, and often being pretty stupid. The two Robert Banks Stewart serials are the exception, so is it these two stories, and the chemistry of the combination of the Doctor, Sarah and Harry which fans regard with such fondness? Apparently not, because Season 13 on the whole is well regarded. Is it, then, the fact that the majority of the fans who so wholeheartedly adore Sarah Jane were of a certain age when they watched the show? This is a more plausible explanation – Sarah was a companion for over two and a half years, over three seasons of stories (it would be over three years before the introduction of the new companion on New Year’s Day 1977), and at a time when the show was incredibly popular. She was the identification figure for every schoolboy and girl who watched the programme, and for a child, three years is a very long time. So maybe this explains the love of the character. I probably have a similar attachment to Ace, and because I never experienced Sarah that way, because I encountered her on my marathon in the wake of the stronger, better developed Jo Grant and having discovered a love of the Pertwee era, perhaps I don’t see the character the way a younger person would. Instead, I see a largely negative personality set up to be a Strong Female Character who devolved into a rather more generic companion who got into trouble and screamed a lot.

This doesn’t explain why Sarah is so popular with other fans who came to the show later, though. So maybe I should be looking elsewhere? It’s apparent that one of my issues with Sarah is her habit of complaining. Even when she and the Doctor aren’t facing monsters and tribulations she has a habit of whining. It’s a personality trait which other companions I don’t particularly like share, namely Tegan and Amy, and it’s also a rather lazy shorthand of trying to make a character ‘strong’ or ‘interesting’. If the complaining and ‘glass half empty’ approach isn’t augmented with humour or other positive character traits, it quickly becomes tiresome and works to the detriment of the character. Both Amy and Sarah seem to suffer from this, and it also explains why Sarah is more likeable with lovable buffoon Harry Sullivan to spar with. Likewise, Tegan is somewhat neutralised by Nyssa’s sensibility and Turlough’s patronising putdowns, but one of the few times where her complaining isn’t grating is during ‘Frontios’ when the Doctor passes her off as a robot to protect her from the Gravis. It’s an incredibly amusing scene which almost makes up for the fact that she’s moaned her way through the last two and a half seasons.

Another thing these companions have in common (and I can add Clara and Jamie to this) is that they stayed around too long. Jamie I can overlook as he had a reprieve in the form of Zoe who brought a much needed new dynamic to the TARDIS team. Clara almost gets away with her extended stay because she was barely a character alongside Matt Smith, had a complete overhaul when Capaldi arrived and became suddenly interesting as an increasingly reckless individual (who was probably suffering from PTSD) in her final season. Tegan, Sarah and the highly obnoxious Amy, however, stuck around for almost three series each and barely changed. While to some this longevity may cement them as a well loved companion, I feel that two seasons is enough. Without change there’s stagnation, and whilst I’d welcome any Doctor to continue for more than three series, it’s a regular turnaround of companions which keep the series and the lead character(s) fresh.

So perhaps it all boils down to the fact that it isn’t Sarah, it’s me. For some, a relatively uninteresting character who’s a bit bolshy, opinionated and, generally speaking, ordinary is what they look for in a companion. Longevity means more stories and familiarity, reliability and safety. For me, I want a character to develop. I want them to go on a journey while they’re with the Doctor and come out of it changed. I was spoilt by the fact that this clearly happened to Ace when I first started watching as a fan. I don’t see that with Sarah Jane Smith; if anything she starts off as a strong character and comes out of it somehow less. She maintains her obstinance and her tendency to be rude to people with little cause, but those are characteristics I don’t like in people and thus traits I don’t want to see in a companion.

I’m still struggling to see why so many fans like her, but I’m starting to see why I don’t, and that’s okay. We can’t all like the same things, and the fact that there are people out there who love Sarah Jane Smith, and those who love Melanie Bush, Amy Pond, Steven Taylor, Martha Jones, Ryan Sinclair and Zoe Herriot, and the fact that there are those who don’t, is one of the factors which has ensured that ‘Doctor Who’ has been around for so long. And that is quite definitely a good thing.