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Green Fingers

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Gift

For a finale The Gift doesn't exactly end the current series with a satisfying bang unless you appreciate the entire cast getting drowned in bits of exploding orange Blathereen. More of a sloppy whimper. Rupert Laight's script captures the frivolous nature of the series and its characters well and still manages to get across a number of important messages about tolerance and acceptance of those different from yourself. Which is fine if he didn't, as Stuart Ian Burns quite rightly points out, turn his Blathereen making all the friendly overtures into the villains of the piece. Not an unexpected move but it does rather imply the precis of the story, about the nature of trust, is perhaps more akin to 'keep your friends close but your enemies closer still'.

The Blathereen are quite clearly the stock Slitheen costumes given a coat of orange paint and, whilst obviously keeping the budget affordable, they do actually work rather well because of the bright idea of bringing in voice talents like Simon Callow and Miriam Margolyes. This covers up the money saving aspects of reusing alien costumes that even four years later on are, just from a technical view, one of the few new series failures. But with Callow and Margolyes in full on mode and a script fizzing with one liners, The Gift just about gets away with the Blathereen.

The Gift also reconfigures that unforgettable scene from Boom Town where Margaret Slitheen sits down to dinner with the Doctor and they mull over the moral issue of whether killing a murderer makes you no better than they are. As Sarah and the kids get ready to entertain the Blathereen couple I wonder how many viewers' itchy prejudices needed scratching about humankind's on/off relationship to 'the Other'. The discussion about race and culture in the kitchen as they make dinner for their visitors is a rather timely one that reflects the continuing anxieties about the naturalisation of immigrants and mimics the kind of dialogue some adults may well inadvertently and innocently be using themselves as one of their children invites a few friends home for tea.

The alien or extraterrestrial experience in Sarah Jane Adventures has also been a mix of wide-eyed reflections on historical and social references to the colonised or the conquered, a united impulse to fight that which is perceived as evil and as a threat to the 'family' or an essay in the struggles of the decentred subject (the 'lost child' is a popular one). With the Slitheen it's more or less a jab at capitalism and its effects and where conquest is about developing mass markets and making lots of money. Here, it literally is about squeezing the Earth dry in order to turn it into a diamond. When we get to the Blathereen, Laight is blurring the lines somewhat and leaves us and Sarah Jane having to think twice about the wonders of the universe and our 'friends' waiting for us out there.

What's intriguing here is that at first the Blathereen are portrayed as political functionaries of the Raxa High Council and then it is revealed that this is merely a front for two farmers who want to turn the Earth into a massive food store. The Blathereen story and the sub-plot about Clyde cheating at his exams dovetail quite neatly here. Honesty and hard work is the best policy it would seem and cheating could be seen as symptomatic of some inner trauma. With Clyde it's possible to see his desire to get through exams with the aid of K9 as a reaction to his dysfunctional family environment and with the Blathereen it's obviously an advantage to them in their competition with the Slitheen. A psychological battle going on between those two Raxicoricofallapatorian families is an interesting aspect to somewhat one-dimensional aliens.

Far better is the sub-plot about the alien plant given to Sarah Jane. As its spores infect those around her and spread across London to become the food stuff that the Blathereen will gorge on, Laight's story starts to push all sorts of Day Of The Triffids type reactionary buttons about 'Frankenstein foods' and GM crops. In the very week this story went out Professor Robert Watson, the chief scientific adviser at Defra called for UK trials of GM foods, arguing that the Government needs to be more open with the public about the risks and benefits of genetically modified foods. The Gift isn't exactly going to do him, his report and the government any favours as it not only tells a tale of alien plant spores choking the world to death but it also chucks in a cheeky swine flu allusion too.

A great plus here is the very natural dialogue and playing between the regulars. Laight's script tunes in to the ensemble dynamic and offers plenty of fun, especially with Clyde trying to use K9 to cheat at his school test. I also liked the continuing spat between Mr. Smith and the metal dog that's then used as an example of forgetting your differences to work for the greater good. Good CG effects for the Rakweed too and a stereotypically Doctor Who method of negating their effect. The school bell won't quite have the same meaning anymore for some children I'm sure and the use and subversion of the familiar within the cause and effect of these adventures offers a knowable and accessible universe to younger viewers.

With the Rakweed eliminated via sound waves and the Blathereen blown up in the attic with their own farts, The Gift adds a coda that's surplus to requirement and somewhat at cautionary odds with the cheerier disposition of the series as a whole. The second episode does have a natural ending in Sarah's paraphrasing of the Fifth Doctor, 'there should have been a better way' but the tacked on epilogue just implores you to stick two fingers down your throat because of its nauseous political correctness about friendship.

Out of Gas

There was a rather good episode of The Thick of It a couple of weeks ago (I know they’re all rather good, but this was especially good) set at the party conference which pinioned on a physical altercation between the descendent of Fires of Pompeii’s Caecilius and Glenn being leaked to bloggers via Twitter.  It felt very now.  As I think someone in the unpopular press said, it made the show even more contemporary because it sounded like something that has already happened, which is hasn’t as far as we know, at least not in the political sphere.  Twitter doesn’t seem to have made it into the Doctor Who universe yet, which means …

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Gift

… lacks a moment in which Clyde and Rani huddle over some client software like Tweetdeck watching words like “weird”, “plant”, “flower”, “splotches” and “twilight” trend in the TwitScoop while the All Friend column is awash with detailed eyewitness reports (well as detailed as they can be in a hundred and forty characters).  This would have been the nu-Who equivalent of the railway station scenes in Doctor Who and the Silurians.  Instead, they were watching BBC News via the iPlayer which whilst a brilliant expression of a governmental programme to get decent broadband into schools also seemed somehow, rather dated.

But The Gift overall felt very old fashioned, but in a good way.  I complained last year that Enemy of the Bane, the climax of the second season was “brash, loud and disjointed, powered by a kind of atomised storytelling which has replaced such incidentals as logical plot structure and coherent character motivation”.  The Gift couldn’t be more different.  Perfectly paced, with a simply plot structure and mostly useful characterisation, it offered the chance to stop and think about the themes being offered up and to laugh at the hijinks of the kids, and concluded with a scene that was about as close to the conclusion to Children of Earth or The Waters of Mars as this adolescent franchise member is likely to have.

After the kind of chase through a warehouse which has all the hallmarks of a typical climax to a story in this series, Writer Rupert Laight (whose previous franchise credits have included some excellent short stories for the Doctor Who website, the novelisations of previous SJA stories and most interestingly one of the stories in Big Finish’s Sarah Jane Smith spin-off series) unexpectedly drops us into a homage to the Stanley Kramer’s film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (or when wet Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) with the Blathereen standing in for Sydney Poitier (or the Klingons).  The dialogue between the kids before hand is very on the nose; airing his suspicions, Luke says that it doesn’t matter what colour they are, they’re from the same planet as the Slitheen, as the camera pans across the kitchen to reveal Clyde and Rani.

Then, uniquely, a good ten minutes of the episode are spent at the dinner (in an empty Rani’s house, the parents conveniently at a conference apparently) with the kids enduring the table manners of their guests, their potentially racist remarks cleverly making us sympathetic towards the Blathereen, so that we understand when Sarah Jane takes them into her trust.  The message until this point is that you can’t take people at face value; as I think Rani says at one point, there are bad people on the planet Earth as well.  But it’s genuinely amusing, aided by some supreme voice work from Simon Callow and Miriam Margolyes of all people, demonstrating the benefits of getting proper actors in for such roles.  Alice Troughton really enjoys stepping up to the challenge of filming the always difficult table scenes, my favourite shot between Sarah Jane and Rani at the sink as the mayhem of the meal plays out behind them.

The rest of the story is like that.  There aren’t that many big action sequences, no speedy runs through corridors or shouting and not a lot of intercutting in the editing actually, with the story quietly playing out in refreshingly long scenes allowing the actors room to act which also benefits the characters, with a return to the neat bits of screwball comedy which were the hallmark of the first season, in this case between Clyde and Rani.  If it didn’t quite work in the attic scenes were Sarah Jane seemed strangely listless initially at the prospect of her perfect (yet soon to be narratively sidelined again) son Luke somehow being ill which is an impossibility and should have tipped her off that something horrendous was in progress, the later scenes in which she enjoyed the reverse of her own domestic dinner party in the Blathereen ship were hilarious messy, bringing to mind the likes of Tiswas or Fungus The Bogeyman.  That right there is how to entertain kids.

A fair use of CGI too.  Though the production team couldn’t stretch to a Slitheen reveal this time, the unveiling of the vivid red petals of the flowers was very effective and the shots of the spores flying through air, though cartoony, had the same disturbing power as the virus droplets in those scenes in Outbreak as we watched them hover over our heroes and their classmates.  Of course, in a perfect world there would have been dozens of these scenes with populace fleeing as the spores degraded even further the air quality of London, but as is always the case in SJA, even if the moon is falling to earth, it’ll be viewed through the eyes of our heroes, the catastrophe being left to our imagination through reported speech.  Perhaps, just as we’ll never know what happened to these kids during Children of Earth, there’s a version of this story were Prime Minister Denise Riley is staring UNIT out across the cabinet table and asking them if they have any good gaseous pesticides.

If there’s a problem with the thematic heart of the story, it’s that having passed on to kids the anti-racism message, the needs of the narrative to have a villain leads to the reveal that the Blathereen were villains all along, a turnaround which is fairly dark stuff for something in the CBBC slot.  People who aren’t like you are ok – oh no wait, no they’re not, they’re bastards after all and they want to take your land.  Laight does briefly leave the possibility hanging that perhaps the Blathereen are set up, but it’s not long before they’re shown chomping their way messily through another meal.  Anyone who’s read the spin-off novel from which they’re sourced, Stephen Cole’s The Monsters Inside, will know that they really are as bad as the Slitheen anyway, I suppose.

Viewed through the prism of recent franchise editions, the conclusion of this story is also fairly challenging.  Having spent the best part of three years saying that sentient beings deserve a second chance, and third, and fourth, and … with the whole conversation about the execution of Margaret in Boomtown having already seen much of her family destroyed by a missile, with whole stories which talk about the orphaning of aliens, Sarah Jane uses Mr Smith to destroy the Blathereen couple, splattering their remains across the inside of the attic in a moment that inappropriately reminded me of the Marvin scene in Pulp Fiction, and like Tarantino’s best scene (!) it’s played for laughs and is very, very funny.

The final moments of the episode demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the series.  The scenes in which our heroes are huddled together amid the orange goo, the actors clearly trying not to laugh, like the earlier were Clyde is trying to hide the tin dog under the table much to Rani chagrin are adorable and demonstrates as I’ve already mentioned over and over and over again that when the characters aren’t simply spouting masses of exposition at each other we like spending time with them.  That's what ultimately made this episode so entertaining.  Plus Clyde's one liners.  And the continued rivalry between Mr Smith and K9.

About the only thing really wrong with the story was the coda.  The perfect end to the story and the season would have been a pan away from the group in that attic wiping Blathereen remains from their eyes, having saved the world and enjoying the consequences.  That final montage which is supposed to bookend the series and may be trying to be as depthful as an Angela’s philosophy montage from My So-Called Life but ends up being as anodyne as similar monstrosities in Heroes or Defying Gravity (“Some people say that life is a dream.  It could be a dream.  It depends if we dream and when we dream and what we dream about etc”). 

Good god, I hope they never do that again.

F For Fake

Sarah Jane Adventures: Mona Lisa's Revenge

I love a good postmodern joke. Especially in Doctor Who. There are several crackers about the Mona Lisa and contemporary art in City Of Death. The problem with Mona Lisa's Revenge is that it tries to extend the punchline on its own terms and the results go down as well as a fifth rate comedian on a wet Friday night at the Glasgow Empire. I don't really mind that Doctor Who and its spin-offs constantly move the goal-posts as far as established continuity are concerned. That's the nature of the beast and no doubt someone is out there frantically trying to square the circle between one version of the creation of the Mona Lisa and this one. So, I didn't sit nervously expecting some contrived ret-conning of the events of City Of Death to explain why Mona Lisa comes to life and has a Northern accent. What I do find annoying is that I'm presented with something so irritatingly dull that I find it painful to watch.

Orson Welles once made a rather clever film, terribly postmodern, about art, reality and forgery. I was hoping we'd get some of those playful ideas here but Phil Ford's script isn't as clever as he seems to think it is. Beyond the main idea of actually bringing La Giaconda to life, he quite clearly hasn't much of an idea what to do with her once she's free, waving a Sontaran blaster in the air and sounding like Melanie Sykes in the old Boddington adverts. I half expected her to bellow out, "Ey, Luke are your trolleys on right way round?" as she picked on Luke for his guilt over a tantrum with Sarah Jane. Ford would have been as well to emulate Duchamp and Dali, who really did know how to send up Da Vinci with a few well chosen Freudian jokes, in this rather tiresome fifty odd minutes.

I couldn't quite work out whether this was a story about a teenage boy's emergence into masculinity, a teenage boy's discovery of his true talents, a really annoying Northern woman clearing pretending to be the Mona Lisa or the repressed love affair between Mr. Harding and Miss Trupp. In the end it was trying to be all of these and yet not entirely succeeding to be any of them because Ford can't settle with any confidence on his theme. The potential story of how a woman in a painting, brought to life, would cope when she finds herself in the real world, is squandered. It barely gets a look in and it's the jewel that's sitting in the middle of the Jackson Pollocks that are so carelessly being thrown together in this story. If anything could have given the story he(art) and soul then Mona's desire to escape her frame of representation, with a comment on the aesthetics, reproduction and exploitation of imagery, would have been very interesting.

For starters, and it's something that personally annoyed me, there's a rather unconvincing and crass discussion between Clyde and Luke about art which for anyone who knows even a modicum about Renaissance art would seem tantamount to blasphemy. Art is apparently not about geometry, it's about soul. A simplistic analysis that makes Leonardo Da Vinci, who probably knew a fair few things about geometry as well plate tectonics, anatomy, solar power, flight and mechanisation, just a another head in the clouds artist who pops a bit of paint on a canvas? Also, I'm all for encouraging those of school age to think seriously about careers in the cultural industries and it's great there is a message that says 'drawing is cool' but did we really have to have those that care about art, about how it connects to everyone's lives, represented by two very worn out old cliches like Mr. Harding and Miss Trupp. They both look like they've wandered out of the Festival Of Britain and seem an unlikely pair to be left in charge of the International Gallery. It employs an assistant curator who comes on sexually to the visitors and is jealous of a woman with no eyebrows.

The set up at the International Gallery suggests a cultural environment that's weak-willed, stuffy and repressed where even those cliches of their day Professors Rubeish, Kettlewell and Kerensky might feel at home. Besides, the security around one of the world's most priceless art treasures is seemingly non-existent and seems almost symptomatic of the insecurity and weird sexual undercurrents at the heart of Harding's obsession with Mona Lisa too. His and Trupp's behaviour suggests that anyone in the arts has to seriously overcompensate in order to stand a chance of getting their leg over. This is stuff best left to poor 1970s sit-coms along with sensible shoes, big bow ties and cardigans and lines like 'Security. The Mona Lisa has been stolen!'

Whilst Episode One just about gets away with it, and is helped greatly by the scenes between Luke and Sarah, the brief exchange between Mr. Smith and Sarah in the attic and Clyde's realisation that he might be talented, it is Episode Two that plunges this story to its place right at the bottom of the series' league table. And I'm looking at you Suranne Jones. She makes Russ Abbott look like a respectable graduate of the Stanlislavski school of acting. It's a BIG performance and it's thoroughly irritating. She's not entirely to blame because it's Ford who has somehow decided that it would be entertaining to have the Mona Lisa come from Salford and use words like 'sugar' and 'blag' and refer to Harding as 'Harders'.

There is also a lot of exposition in Episode Two. Lots of telling and very little showing to try and explain Mona's relationship to her brother but I'm not entirely clear what exactly Mona Lisa is seeking revenge for? Yes, she wants to free her Abomination brother from a painting but how does that work as an act of revenge? Revenge on whom? The artist? People who visit art galleries? Ford hurriedly cobbles together a mishmash of explanations via at least four characters and even reuses his own 'energy force trapped in a meteorite' plot from The Day Of Clown. The worst aspect of this is the whole Chekhov's gun use of the Chinese puzzle box. It was obviously signaled in Episode One but by Episode Two Ford thinks we've completely forgotten about it, even though it's being mentioned rather a lot in dialogue, and he bungs in a flashback to Episode One. Similarly, it happens with Clyde's drawing of K9. Insultingly, it's assuming the audience's attention span resembles that of a gnat.

Whilst all this is going on the star of the show has unceremoniously been framed in a picture and dumped on the floor for much of Episode Two. Whilst Lis Sladen may have wanted a bit of a break, I was rather miffed that we weren't going to see much of her in her fetching Pertwee outfit of blue velvet jacket and white frilly blouse. Whilst she's sorely missed from the story, I appreciate that the three regulars work very hard to try and make this dog's dinner remotely palatable. I quite like the ideas of creatures hiding in paintings and the story of the Abomination is interesting but the execution here is spoiled by an over-ripe performance from Suranne Jones, an unclear revenge plot and way too much running about and talking.

One thing that did bother me about the idea of paintings coming to life was that Ford flagrantly ignored his own vague suggestion that what was in the frame, only what was painted, would be given life. Mona Lisa suddenly has a whole body and can walk, the silent highwayman (and Clyde does point out that he can't speak because his mouth was never painted) who can fire pistols repeatedly even though they're supposed to be single load. How on earth can he fire them anyway, did the artist paint the bullet primed in the chamber? We've also seen much of this before - Luke's growing pains and his last minute bluff with the villain particularly - and now we're in the third year of SJA this familiarity is starting to breed contempt. By the time K9 pops up from a drawing and zaps the Abomination, Mona Lisa's Revenge has more or less drifted along on a sea of improbable and highly coincidental MacGuffins, scenery chewing and vague ideas. Now, can someone please write a real script because this one has definitely got 'this is a fake' watermarked all the way through it.

Mona Lisa Frowns.

Sarah Jane Adventures: Mona Lisa's Revenge

There aren’t that many aspects of Doctor Who that could be considered sacred ground. The geography of the series is such that any idea, item and even historical events have been run across over and over again, be they the sinking of the Marie Celeste, volcano day in Pompeii or visits from Shakespeare. Not even the mythology of the series is immune to being written and rewritten, crossed out and written over again until it resembles the order slip in our local takeaway when I’m trying to decide what to have for dinner and I’m not sure if I’m in the mood for sweet and sour or a curry. It tends to depend on the original story the object featured.

City of Death is just such a story. Written by a proper writer and the nation’s favourite until Steven Moffat wrote Blink, Douglas Adams’s Paris runaround is about as perfect a story as you’re like to find in old Who and the reason I visited the city (this was in the time before I discovered the French New Wave). To grasp my love for the story, I’d suggest you read this, and this but suffice to say that my eyebrows were nestled firmly in the arches of my receding hairline when I heard that The Sarah Jane Adventures were going to have the audacity of producing Mona Lisa’ Revenge.

Sacrilege. Sacrilege! I was in the curious position of being on the theological side of the Life of Brian debate from Friday Night, Saturday Morning and like Mervyn Stockwood, then Bishop of Southwark, I was rubbing a religious talisman, in my case the keyring in the shape of the Eiffel Tower I’d bought when I was in Paris (clip here, from a documentary curiously narrated by young David Tennant). But unlike them, I was willing to watch with an open mind. I quite like Suranne Jones usually and well it is the Sarah Jane Adventures, so what’s the worse that could happen?

At least the version of the Mona Lisa used wasn’t the charming GCSE-level slap job that appeared in City of Death. And the National Museum of Cardiff, a refreshingly different idea for a "base under siege", looked suitably grand doubling as the “International Art Gallery” even if the dressings in the room from Temple of Peace in which the painting was displayed could only partially hide it’s first appearance as part of Platform One in The End of the World. The performances of the regulars couldn’t really be faulted either, the scene between Lis Sladen and Alexander Armstrong in the opening episode more than making up for Sarah Jane dropping out for most of the rest of the story.

Otherwise Mona Lisa’s Revenge was a tedious bunch of old cobblers, easily as bad as Enemy of the Bane and nudging towards Secrets of the Stars. At the risk of sounding like a prosecuting lawyer in kids television equivalent of The Hague, it’s one of those examples of a drama whose awfulness slowly occurs to you over time until you reach a point when you realise you can’t quite believe what you’re watching and if you’re like me you start shouting. It happened for me at about the time Lisa began flashing her blaster around and with relatively few anti-lulls I sat slumped wanting it to end and knowing that it wasn’t going to for many, many, many minutes. 

Like Secrets of the Stars, the awfulness of the story can be largely traced to the central performance within the guest cast. Suranne Jones, like Russ Abbot before her, seems to have been under the impression that the thing to do in children’s sci-fi is to go BIG and indulge in the very worst campery no matter what the rest of the cast seem to be doing. She was loud, she was brash and she sucked the air out of every scene. Jones can be a capable actress, except instead of the camp joy of Kate O’Mara, her keystone seemed to be Geoffrey Orme’s Zaroff in The Underwater Enemy, the rest of the guest cast caught in the crossfire.

Jones wasn’t helped by the ripeness of the dialogue and characterisation gifted to her which didn’t rise above a register much higher than “Nothing in the world can stop me now, ducks”. Writer Phil Ford does seem to have a problem writing his adversaries. With the exception of Day of the Clown’s Old Bob they really are a set of one-dimensional ravers, which as Gareth Roberts shows in The Trickster doesn’t necessarily need to be so. In Mona’s case, with the exception of her serpentine seduction of Jeff Rawle’s curator, much of her action consisted of empty threats and declarations of what she was about to do if she could just do something else. 

There was one scene that suggested the possibilities for the character; when faced with the outside world she (for some unexplained reason) found she couldn’t step i’th’sun lest she become oil paint again. But the melancholic implications of that weren’t full explored because Ford was too intent on replicating some of the story points about being trapped in pictures from sources as diverse as Roald Dahl’s The Witches (Solveg, pictured), Justin Richards’s Demontage and Matthew Graham’s Fear Her, a corner he was presumably painted into when coming up with the mechanism for Mona being released from the painting in the first place.

After Mona Lisa’s Revenge, we’re now expected to believe that in an already convoluted Whoniverse, when Leonardo Di Vinci painted the original Mona Lisa, he used some paint from his weirdo neighbour, made-up artist Di Cattivo, which with its alien properties led to Mona becoming a corporeal manifestation with a Mancunian accent. Di Vinci was then kept a prisoner by the splinter of Scaroth that was Captain Tancredi (“Captain Tancredi?!?”) and forced to paint six copies of the painting all with “this is a copy” marked on the canvas by the Doctor. Where those six created using the same paint? Was there a small army of Mona’s waiting to be released?

The story’s whole attitude to art was fairly suspect. The veneration of the Mona Lisa was a good idea and the painting was presumably chosen by David Fisher for much the same reason when he was writing his first draft of City of Death. It’s recognisable, iconic. And there is some Reithian merit in explaining something of when Di Vinci created the work (even if, like City of Death, it forgets to mention that the painters ironically worked on the thing in France during the revolution). But made-up artist Di Cattivo’s work looked entirely out of period to me and I say that not because I’m trying to be a farty-farty-Sewell-pants but because it breaks the authenticity of the story. 

The selection of Clyde’s painting too says a lot about the judges they’d choose it above whatever else was submitted by the other students. It’s part of the cranking out the plot, of course. You have to place the kids in the gallery and the only justifiable reason they’d visit would after winning a competition. Rani’s had her episode, Luke’s is coming up so it has to be Clyde. What kind of art would Clyde do? Well we’re not going the Pushing Daisies route and working against type (no knitting) so it has to be a sub-2000 AD daub instead of anything too challenging. Nothing too witty, please.

The requisite soap element seemed old hat too (as old hat, in fact as using the phrase 'old hat' to describe something as being old hat). The material about Luke becoming more human and leaving his room untidy was the kind of thing which motored the first season culminating in The Lost Son and it seems out of character for Luke to leave his room untidy anyway. Is he doing it on purpose, is that the idea? What kind of message is that to send kids? The loss of Sarah Jane for much of the story is also a disappointment, especially since the reason was a rerun of the aforementioned Fear Her, though probably understandable if it was a production requirement. Was Lis taking a well earned break or filming her scenes for The Marriage of Sarah Jane Smith?

It's also fairly ironic that Fisher and Adams wrote K9 out of City of Death for precisely the reason he was deployed here to vanquish the enemy. True, his appearance was part of Luke's plan and he wasn't the real K9 (somehow having knowledge of his masters and mistresses despite having originated from a drawing which means he might as well equally be wondering where Romana, Leela, her K9 and the rest of Gallifrey have got to). But as the writers in the original series soon realised, you have to use the robot dog sparingly otherwise your audience will be waiting around for him to save the day, each and every week. After set up the creepiness of this monster from the painting, the writer effectively capsized his good work by making him easily beaten with a laser beam.

Having worked on accession databases in art galleries, I could also take against the idea that this museum would have cellar full of work which hasn’t been looked at since Victorian times and which the curator doesn’t have much of an idea about I’m genuinely making myself angry thinking about it which is not what you want on a Friday night and was the least of the story's problems. There’s only so much you can say against a thing before you become tedious yourself and I suspect I’m outstaying my welcome and best get out before I start making unfair direct comparisons with Douglas Adams and going into the usual tat about the decline of television in general. Suffice to say I didn’t like this. At all. And it’s probably spoiled City of Death for me, which is its worst crime of all.

Next Week: The finale. Yay!

Old Ghosts

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Eternity Trap

After last week's story expressed the emotional heart of the series, you can forgive Phil Ford for not quite matching its success with The Eternity Trap. It was a hard act to follow. He certainly understands here the importance of striking out with a different tone. And what better way to help him do that than a particularly savvy commando raid on the horror genre toy box. He, and director Alice Troughton, put all their efforts into providing a rich brew of horror and suspense tropes, evoking a sense of pure nostalgia in us silver haired viewers but likely to act as a refresher course in the genre's narrative and visual hooks for the youngsters out there. There's no better way to plant seeds in the minds of the curious and introduce them to the required texts.

Based on this I hope that teens everywhere are Googling The Stone Tape and getting their first introduction to the master of the genre, Nigel Kneale, or their parents are scaring the heck out of them with a first screening of The Shining or The Innocents or both. A scientific investigation into paranormal phenomena might well be something they've only seen recently on Most Haunted but hopefully the younger audience will get past that dubious association and unearth the genre's own rather prolific stone tape of influences.

The trail is there, from the echoing snatch of Al Bowly singing 'Midnight, The Stars And You' (thanks to The Shining) as Clyde and Rani explore the pavilion and get creeped out by a fountain that starts up of its own accord, the almost subliminal shots of the Marchwood children standing in the corridors (The Shining again), to the wet footprints and ghostly laughter that reminds you of that story of the uncanny par excellence The Innocents and its Henry James source, to Floella Benjamin's blatant nod to the 'stone tape theory' as she explains why the Pharos Institute are investigating Ashen Hill Manor. Yes, a haunted house story that even nicks a few bits from The Haunting too with invisible creatures stalking the characters and Benjamin's opening narration. As Rani sums it up, 'Some of us are a bit new to this kind of thing. You might need to explain.' Clyde however invokes plenty of modern examples of the genre including Harry Potter and Tim Burton to comfortably mark out the territory for the uninitiated.

Troughton works very hard to generate genuine tension and chills and she achieves this admirably. There's a very feverish atmosphere about Episode One as Sarah, Clyde and Rani explore the various rooms of the Manor accompanied by Troughton's continually prowling and tracking camera. She's not afraid to use it as a character's point of view either and to also keep the threats out of the frame, using suggestion as a way to build the atmosphere. A tried and tested methodology that can't be beaten. Throw in composer Sam Watts insistence on using that oh-so-familiar musical motif from Krzysztof Penderecki's 'The Awakening Of Jacob' as showcased so effectively by Kubrick in The Shining and the visual and aural delights are complete.

So the stage is set, paying off very handsomely in Episode One, but as is often the case with Sarah Jane Adventures, the concluding denouement comes over as rushed, slightly incoherent and offers a villain who barely has time to get his motivation across and do his nefarious deeds before Sarah Jane and company put the mockers on him. The story in itself is engaging up to a point and one of the more interesting side tracks that The Eternity Trap makes is its exploration of the effects of modernity and rationalisation upon unexplained phenomena, where Professor Rivers, Sarah Jane, Clyde, Rani and Toby all strive to secularise, intellectualise and systematise their reactions to the uncanny and paranormal phenomena.

Rivers wants to study it and apply scientific rationalisation to it, Sarah Jane and her companions simply want to categorise it as alien because that is the perfect way for them to expertly deal with the cause of the phenomena. The overlaying of a technological, scientific solution onto the manifestations at Ashen Hill Manor key into similar science=magic discussions that have cropped up in Doctor Who itself, everything from The Daemons through to The Image Of The Fendahl. Toby Silverman is a pivotal character here - he's a scientist who wants to prove the existence of paranormal phenomena because it's a personal matter in that he also has to prove it to a disenchanted father figure. By the end of Episode One, even Rani's convinced that all they have seen is real, whilst Sarah Jane remains thoroughly sceptical. However, as soon as Clyde and Rani open the cupboard in Erasmus' underground chamber and we see the flashing lights of machinery, the genie is out of the bottle and Phil Ford's carefully built hysteria fizzles away. It's then clear Episode Two will be spent putting two fingers up to the notion of haunted houses, ghosts and things that go bump in the night.

One of the problems with Episode Two is Donald Sumpter's ripe performance. I suspect it's his way of overcompensating for the lack of decent motivation and development for the Erasmus Darkening character. By playing it up he's helping cover up the underlying weakness of the threat. The best parts of Episode Two are the more emotionally affecting moments with Lord Marchwood and his search for his lost children Joseph and Elisabeth. By eventually reuniting them the story does partly achieve some decent closure.  Again, the splitting up of families is a consistent theme and is echoed again by the crowd of people who have have been trapped in the house and cut off from their loved ones. It also dovetails rather nicely with Toby's story, providing us with some further explanation for his belief in the supernatural after Sarah Jane denounces it as 'nonsense'. His claims about something 'grey, with no face' haunting his six year old self fit well into his obvious parent - child anxieties. It's more about the cruelty of a parent not recognising the trauma of a frightened child than definite evidence of the existence of paranormal beings. Whatever it was has driven Toby on to try and prove his fear, and by extension his belief, to his father.

Knowing more or less that Erasmus is some extra-dimensional creature using technology to trap people rather undermines the efforts to keep the concluding episode scary. Clyde and Rani running round the Manor as all manner of things spring into life around them tends to lack the creepiness of similar scenes in Episode One even if the sequence of them being pursued by an invisible creature is still reasonably effective. It unfortunately becomes more like Ghostbusters rather than the visceral thrills of an M.R. James story. However, overall it's certainly better than Ford's rather limp season opener and without Luke, K9 and Mr. Smith the script gets to spend some time beefing up the relationship between Rani and Clyde. This is helped by engaging performances from Daniel Anthony and Anjli Mohindra. Adam Gillen makes Toby geeky and odd but also rather sympathetic. Floella Benjamin's a complete law unto herself as Celeste Rivers. 

In the end Episode Two treads water to the inevitable conclusion where Sarah Jane will put a spanner in Erasmus' works and send him flying back to where he came from. Even though we see Rivers return to our dimension what's not entirely clear is whether the rest of the trapped souls return to their own places in time and space. The Marchwoods, it would seem, have actually become ghosts which does rather confuse the rationalisation of the paranormal that the story strives to hammer home. The final scene shows Toby, now set back on the path of scientific rationalism, leaving and Clyde announcing 'No such things as ghosts then, Sarah Jane?' as she gets an eyeful of the spooks watching her from the windows of the Manor. Having your cake and eating it seems to be Ford's desire at the end of that episode.

The Family Stone

One of my current guilty pleasures is The Well, a short form haunted house adventure produced by BBC Switch, the slightly hazy department brought in when it was decided that the BBC Childrens shouldn’t cater for anyone over the age of twelve to offer something to older teenagers, in this case one of those 360 degree productions that also includes a computer game on the website.

You’ve probably heard of it before because it’s also the very horror drama Karen Gillan recorded before moving to Cardiff and though its slender plot-based running time (the episodes are about eight minutes long) doesn’t allow for much in the way of poetic dialogue or revelatory performances (The Kevin Bishop Show was a better expression of Karen’s charms), there are some truly disconcerting moments as the four central teenagers become enveloped in The Well’s mystery and it’s particularly sinister because it was filmed just round the park from where I’m sitting.

It provides an interesting contrast for Phil Ford’s "haunted" house adventure The Eternity Trap which is obviously focused on the younger age group. The Well also has its fair share of torch-lit dark corridor moments but is dealing in psychological horror as each of the characters finds themselves becoming part of “whatever’s down there” in some cases almost killing them in the process. In this Sarah Jane adventure, though the regulars are often captured and lots of threats are made against them, all of them are in a kind of implied danger and none of them really got hurt – only Enrico Casali from The Wheel in Space, sorry, Commander Ridgeway from The Sea Devils, sorry Erasmus Darkening was hurt in the end (though given we knew nothing much about him and he was only sucked into a portal I expect even that’s not true). The rule seems to be – kids tv – no hurt the regulars – hazy teenage tv – hurt them plenty.

Yet The Eternity Trap does mange to be properly unsettling in places and not just because of Adam Gillen’s (no relation) performance (which seemed to pitched somewhere between Richard Pearce giving us his Jeremy Fitzoliver in The Paradise of Death and Dustin Diamond giving us his Screech in Saved By The Bell). For once, the budget constraints of the series work for the story, cutting Sarah Jane, Clyde and Rani off from most of the fantastical elements which usually aid them in their adventures, Mr Smith, K9, the Attic and Luke (Tommy Knight probably off doing his GCSEs or filming a Luke heavy episode for later in the series) and conveniently their mobile phones and putting them into a single scary location (assuming this wasn’t recorded in about five different locations like these things usually are). Aided only by a sonic lipstick, tricorder wrist watch and some not-ghosts with a keen eye for well paced exposition, means that easy answers aren’t always forthcoming providing some genuine mystery.

Ford and director Alice Troughton work their way through the haunted house playbook from top to bottom, but in a fairly knowing way, in that way that Tom Baker refers to when he says "Doctor Who is watched at several levels in an average household. The smallest child terrified behind a sofa or under a cushion, and the next one up laughing at him, and the elder one saying 'sh, I want to listen', and the parents saying 'isn't this enjoyable'.” We know that the books moving about, doors closing, wind in a still room, random sourceless noises and presences appearing and disappearing and the monster we can only see in eye of terror of its prey through point of view shots or red eyes in the darkness are clichés hoary and old but we can giggle at the fact that this could be the first time some kids are exposed to them knowing that they’ll graduate to Poltergeist, The Blair Witch Project and Halloween later. They might be cliché’s but they work.

When Troughton stops us from being able to see what’s going on outside the televisual frame by not providing obvious cutaways and calls on composer Sam Watts to layer in some deathly inhuman sounds on the soundtrack it’s difficult not get a slight chill, especially if like me you’re watching it in a cold room (and can’t be arsed to get up and put the radiator on). And we can tell that Ford knows what he’s doing because in the opening episode, when, and not for the first time in the Whoniverse, he invokes Nigel Kneale; this isn’t a couple of kooks investigating the phenomena in the house but scientists from the Pharos Insitute on a research trip, a trope that Kneale consistently used, and it’s suggested that the ghostly activity might be a way of proving the Stone Tape theory, which the Quatermass writer of course turned into a tv play in the early 70s that also revolved around a haunted mansion (and not using the inverted commas that have to surround the pile at the centre of The Eternity Trap).

As a threat Erasmus Darkening was a little bit disappointing. The trapping of those poor people in a nether dimension was a bit non-specific (certainly less clear than in Big Finish's The Chimes at Midnight) and with the exception of that wonderful shot of the multitude on the stairs had all of the hallmarks of an Ainley Master special, lots of tell, not much show, plenty of giggling, lots of tricks. Rather like Torchwood’s Bilis Manger he promises much, has volumes of personality, is a bit creepy, probably frightening enough for a generation who missed out on The Demon Headmaster, but is also somehow aireless. It’s the timeslot perhaps which stops this leather-pated scoundrel from turning up to eleven; Sumpter constantly seemed forced to hold something back, as though he was expecting the next line to be filled with some black language that would open up the gates of hell and he didn’t want to go too far just in case. Perhaps another time (editor, please insert a funny joke here about European exchange students. Thanks).

But all in all, I’m quite enamoured with The Eternity Trap. It’s certainly Phil Ford’s best script since The Last Sontaran and like that season two opener, really benefited from being set in one location and with a tiny group of characters, far away from the multiple location large cast stories in which the needs of production have a habit of overwhelming the story. I’m not sure why Floella Benjamin plays Professor Rivers like she’s still narrating the documentaries on the Black Guardian dvd boxset all strange intonation and wild line readings but on the upside story also features Callum Blue, the Fitz Kreiner I have in my head and the best Doctor we’ll never have because he’s too much like David Tennant. Despite a floppy wig Callum gives a knock out performance as Lord Marshwood, yet another apparition after a year and a half on (the not quite as good after Bryan Fuller left) Dead Like Me. There’s a nice screwball relationship brewing between Clyde and Rani with the former’s habit of joking about everything he sees like a demented comedian's Twitter account and roving hands clearly getting on the latter’s wick and it’s nice to see Sarah Jane not treating a threat like it’s the scariest thing she’s ever seen, remembering that, to paraphrase a different franchise, she’s flown from one end of the galaxy to the other, and seen a lot of strange stuff.

Next Week: The series risks stepping over sacred ground. Will Mona have a tattoo on her back that reads "This is a fake"?

Love And Marriage

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Wedding Of Sarah Jane Smith

Well, we had no need to worry. The idea of the Doctor popping up in one of the parent series' offspring shows could have gone so horribly wrong. What is so striking about the two episodes of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is that everyone gets their due - Sarah and the kids (a proto-Doctor with her own companions) and the Doctor, K9, the Trickster - and writer Gareth Roberts deftly balances all the elements in a breathlessly energetic narrative. What I like about Roberts' approach here is that, although this is yet another view of, and threat to, Sarah Jane's personal life, this one really touches on the parent series' own dynamic of giving the companions a full emotional life. This is something denied to pretty much all the companions in the Classic Series and within the Sarah Jane Adventures Roberts has made a significant effort to transfer the capacity of this new approach to developing companion characters and has applied it to the one of the few original companions that really deserved a fuller life.

Episode One explores how Sarah Jane exists beyond the frame of the parent show with the revelation that she has seen other men but that because of her mad life with and without the Doctor she's never really managed to find the love of her life. This was the catalyst that was sparked by School Reunion and cleverly continues to be developed beyond Doctor Who. In this story, Sarah Jane has a shot at a proper relationship and we see her in the throes of her love for Peter Dalton.

We also get a very interesting 'what if': if and when Sarah does get married would she completely abandon her activities as protector of Earth? There's a glimpse of this and it's not only unsettling when she initiates total deactivation of Mr. Smith and clears out the attic (yes, she' s under the influence of the Trickster when she does this) but 'and goodbye to all that' is an intriguing prospect for the character. Why shouldn't a major player in the Whoniverse have the option to lead a thoroughly normal life? It's further underlined when the Trickster shows her a vision of married life with Dalton.

Accept the inevitable conclusion that her love for Peter Dalton is very likely to be doomed and then sit back and enjoy what is in all essence a slick screwball comedy in Episode One and a tale of star crossed lovers in Episode Two, both of whom must make huge personal sacrifices to ensure the status is most definitely quo by the end of the story. The comedy elements, a series of deliciously daft slapstick farcical touches, include Luke, Rani and Clyde snooping on Sarah Jane and trying to bluff their way through the appearance of K9, when Dalton arrives at Bannerman Road, closely followed by Rani and Clyde chasing a cartoon alien blob along the streets.

Whilst the capers take place in the background, the more serious matter of how Luke will cope with the effort of bonding with his potential new father take centre stage. Nigel Havers is perfect casting as the suave Peter Dalton and Tommy Knight is again brilliant as Luke as he stumbles towards accepting the new man in Sarah's life. Dalton's actually a very tragic figure. It's a sad tale of a man who was supposed to have died but was pulled back from the brink by the hideous Trickster to manipulate Sarah Jane and the timelines. There are some distinctly adult themes in here. The series has certainly always been about the relationship between parents and children. Often it focuses on somewhat dysfunctional families too - Maria and the on/off relationship between Chrissie and Alan, Clyde and his absent father, fatherless Luke and parent-less Sarah Jane to name a few - and with the absence of strong father figures (you wouldn't exactly say Haresh is a powerful authority figure because since his introduction as the school's headmaster he's been hen-pecked into submission by Gita) there's a theme here about children's growing independence from their parents. The monsters in Sarah Jane Adventures are simply symbolic of the fears and anxieties that children must encounter as they inevitably come to terms with their burgeoning adulthood and the separation from their parents. 

Clearly that most absent of all fathers is the Doctor himself. That great big symbol of authority, the epitome of the law-giver, the fountain of social order heralds his return to Earth via the roar of the TARDIS engines. Quite appropriate that as Peter and Sarah Jane almost complete the exchange of vows, the Doctor bursts into the room and not only attempts to make the marriage null and void but also becomes surrogate father to Luke, Clyde and Rani. And then the Trickster pops up all dressed in white and vows to possess Sarah Jane Smith 'forever'. The bizarre thought of the Trickster becoming Sarah's husband and Luke's father is an undercurrent here and there's the Oedipal challenge to Luke and to the others to therefore 'deny' the Trickster as his/their father. At the same time the Doctor represents all those qualities that Luke himself must possess, as an adult, to suppress this 'other' father and grow to be as powerful a man as the Doctor. There's such an awful lot of Oedipal stuff rattling around in these two episodes that psychoanalysts could probably set up an all day conference to discuss it.

Roberts also wittily subverts the conventions of Classic Who in the way the three teenagers relate to the Doctor as his surrogate companions. They clamour for answers when he gives them a pat 'I'll explain later' to all their questions and after an amusing use of a football rattle he calms them down and offers the answers that everyone wants, including the audience. As the quasi-marriage of Sarah and Peter continues to rumble on in the same dimension, the more powerful marriage of the Doctor and his three temporary companions is cemented as they attempt to understand and unpick the Trickster's temporal schism.

The depiction of marriage, especially the strange conjunction between Peter, Sarah and the Trickster is a subtle way of articulating the fears that some children might have about their parents re-marrying or just simply finding a new person to share their life with. It's all about the resistance to, and the reasonable acceptance of, change in the course of family life. With Sarah's constant reference to 'another man' (by extension meaning the Doctor) we are faced again with that idea that Sarah has simply been waiting for the Doctor to come back into her life to give it fulfilment once more. Here he's actually more of a reason for divorce if anything else! Sarah is battling with her conscience about three very distinct husband/father figures. No wonder the poor woman can't settle down. But she's also trying to keep the female principle alive, maintaining a symbol of feminine power that could be subjugated by any one of her three husbands/fathers. 'The moment I put that ring on my finger I was your puppet' she gasps at Peter after realising she's trapped. And the Trickster has a very strange line in marriage guidance counseling.

As the Doctor detects her movement in time he also asserts his authority as husband/father whilst Roberts has a dig at the series own bete noir about the main character's name. 'Sarah Jane. She doesn't like being called Sarah.' Rani reminds him. 'She does by me.' demands the Doctor. And if we are going to trowel on the significance of marriage, husbands and fathers then the Trickster's splitting up of the temporal schism to prevent the Doctor and his extended family from helping their wife/mother is just articulating the 'divorce' between the feminine unconscious and the male spirit or as the Doctor succinctly puts it, 'The Trickster's separated us'.

The Trickster's clever though. He knows about the power of human emotions and Peter's flesh and blood declaration of his love for Sarah Jane is the bait for his nefarious scheme. Unless Sarah Jane does marry Peter then they are all trapped in his Twilight Zone of nowhere. A nightmare form of enforced marital bliss in which Sarah's very identity and purpose are eradicated. Blimey, I bet there's a few women and men in the audience who feel some empathy to her plight. Thankfully we've got the pure artron energy of the TARDIS to give the fella with the big gob a bit of a jolt and the TARDIS symbolically plonking itself directly between Sarah and Peter, with the Doctor, as the quintessence of authority figures, indicating to them both the only way to defeat the Trickster.

The final sequence where Sarah has to convince Peter that he must die in order to offer a gift of life is tough stuff for a children's series. That 'I love you but I can't love you' scene truly belongs to Sladen and this is quite probably the most heartfelt she's ever been in the series. Havers is also really rather bloody good too and that 'So here I go' after he flings the wedding ring at the Trickster and his 'I love you Sarah Jane Dalton' as he passes into the great beyond should melt the hardest of hearts.

A sad coda, as Sarah is seen to be jilted at the altar and later sits alone in the attic, is turned into joy as the Doctor arrives, more like the strange but kindly uncle who visits now and again, and escorts everyone around the TARDIS. It would be the biggest thrill for children of all ages and Joss Agnew just gets that camera to roam all the way around the interior as you or I would want to ourselves. Lovely. And that final poignant question from Sarah, 'Is this the last time I'm ever going to see you' evokes all kinds of emotions in the audience because we know great change is in the air. It might very well be the last time she will see him...as David Tennant. 'Don't forget me, Sarah Jane' paraphrases the Tenth of the Fourth and the camera glides away trailing a sense of melancholia as the TARDIS door closes. It dematerialises and leaves our little family looking to the future.

The Adventures Of Titular Timelord In The Second Long Dimension

Before the gap year, one idea I wish they’d thought about was to have the Doctor crop up in other shows, but only ever in the background, rather like the knitted toy from Harry Hill’s TV Burp. So we’d see the timelord, screwdriver in hand, running down the corridors of Holby City, chatting with the gardener in Jane Austen’s Hartfield, looking slightly annoyed as part of the studio audience on Strictly (presumably keep an eye on her sargacity) and the TARDIS sitting once again in Albert Square (finally canonising, once and for all Dimensions in Time). A scheduling nightmare for David Tennant perhaps, but a great way of keeping fans watching the BBC when their favourite show isn’t on television.

Eventually it would become apparent that all of these appearances aren’t simple cameos but connected together to form a story, the various bits and bobs eventually becoming part of a slightly larger drama leading into one of the specials perhaps or standing alone. Great as I thought this idea was, I had feared that the Doctor’s appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures would just be a miniature version of it, a vague appearance in the middle of the story, perhaps to sort out the cliffhanger ala Angel turning up at in the last couple of episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Silly me. For months this crossover had been trailed as a proper adventure for the Doctor and so it was, in a brilliant, brilliant way.

Don't expect this review of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith to be the most coherent piece of writing you've ever seen. I'm too excited. There will be repetitious use of prop words, tiresome hyperbole and as many synonyms of the word excellent as my word processor and synonym.com can muster.

More than the first two stories this series, each of these episodes had a distinctive flavour. The opening instalment, the set up, was a funny, sweet, tender in place and hilarious. By spreading the story out over a couple of weeks, we were finally able to see the attic team within a rather more realistic context, instead of the artificially short timescale bursts of action that make up much of the rest of the series. There’s something about this kind of experimentation that immediately makes the drama more substantial, more like a family series and it’s a credit to writer Gareth Roberts that he felt that he could sustain it within just twenty-odd minutes.

The scenes in which the kids were curious about Sarah Jane’s new man but had to hide the alien elements of their lives were hilarious, the potential double bluff of the package which we might presume would be a Graske turning out to be a cartoon alien, a good choice. Well directed too, with the clever use (patented by the Zucker Brothers) of slapstick occurring behind a perfectly reasonable conversation happening in the foreground. During a story in which characters like Clyde or Rani could be sidelined and might have been in other series, Roberts was careful to keep them in the story from the off and remained active participants right through of the conclusion (even if we missed out on a double take from the Doctor in relation to her name).

I also love the way that the two “novelty” characters with essentially the same narrative function (what was Mr Smith if not a K9 substitute?) bickering about who gets to engage the catalytic plot converter. It’s certainly brought out the best in Alexander Armstrong, who began playing his character in a disconcerting monotone but has brought a sardonic deadpan quality to his lines of late. The integration of K9 has been less of a jolt too, the robot dog becoming an extra confident for Sarah Jane on those subjects she can’t talk to the kids about. This is K9 and Company done properly and certainly preferable to the moribund K-9 which is looking more horrific with every new preview clip (tag line "WHO's a good dog?" -- ugh).

The episode clearly had some money spent on it. Look! People! In cafés and streets! The kids running around places that don’t look like they’ve experienced a 28 Weeks Later zombie clearance! Nigel Havers mustn’t have been cheap either, but worth every Flainian pobble bead. Who else but Havers could turn his character, beige Peter Dalton, into the kind of man this older version of Sarah Jane could convincingly fall in love quickly without any suspicions that he was some alien terror bent on sucking out her brains etc, but that some of the kids might be a bit apprehensive about because he’s so charming?

There were some beautifully played moments between him and Tommy Knight, who excelled as Luke tried to come to terms with the possibility of a having a proper father figure, something he didn’t even have in the Bane. But everyone raised their game here as though, with the impending appearance of the Doctor, they realised that their series finally had a proper shop window for their wares and they’d better get themselves in order, dust down the wooden brushes and plastic fruit. Sam Watt’s music was some of the most heartfelt the franchise has produced – has K9’s theme always been the middle-eighth?

And what an appearance. The extra million who bothered to turn over from the repeat of Midsomer Murders on the other side might have been a bit perturbed that the Doctor didn’t appear straight away, but the grunt and growl of the distressed TARDIS whispering through the episode perfectly teased his emergence, even if there was a certain panto element to us kids shouting “It’s the Doctor, he’s trying to get through…” to our heroes, going about their business, unaware of what the Type 40 even sounds like.

Even so, with all the build up, these two episodes had a lot to live up to, and in a way it would have been, like Christmas and World Championship Boxing in Las Vegas, completely understandable if it didn’t quite live up to expectations. Then to have the Doctor burst through the doors during “lawful impediment” was just perfect. There’s that word again. Perfect. But it was, it just was. I applauded right through the credits, which I know is perfectly possible these days since they last about three seconds, but totally unheard of at The Sarah Jane Adventures.

The intellectual exercise of writing the Doctor into this story must have been immense. As we’ve been told time and again, and we’ve seen, he’s an all powerful wandering god and in the person of David Tennant one of the most famous people on television at the moment, an immense presence who if you’re not careful could like Sean Kingston in that leaked Sugababes track overpower your regulars and make them look stupid. But then, if you deliberately try and handicap the character so that he’s around but isn’t really much use in the story and doesn’t have some part in the resolution even though he’s the most capable one there you’re going to look stupid.

Gareth Roberts’s intricate solution was indeed to handicap the Doctor somewhat with one of the main sources of his power, the TARDIS phasing in and out, but to have the character himself voicing the fact that he needs the kid’s help to succeed, saying how important they are to the whole processes of saving the world or more specifically their place in it once again, and then turning them into his companion figures for the duration, offering them hints to the situation so that they could work everything out for themselves, which in production terms meant that they weren’t just standing around being lectured at by the all knowing timelord buzzing about. The climax recalled the original first series of nuWho (Moffat is renumbering), in that the Doctor, and in this case Sarah Jane, convinced the not necessarily as special Dalton to sacrifice his potential happiness for the good of the universe.

It must have been quite weird for Tennant to complete filming on his final story chronologically, The End of Time (or whatever his last episode is called), with the regeneration. But it wasn’t noticeable in the episode, and he simply seemed to be relishing the opportunity to take the character around the block one last time (his final recorded line as the Doctor was "‘You two – with me. Spit spot!"). All of the ticks that most of us know and love were there, the bit were he talks epically in a lower voice, the shouty friendly introduction, "K-niiiine!", and the stuttering. He was even gifted a proper stand-off with the Trickster (Key To Time. Squee. Eternals. Squeeeee. Hmm, that was a good one.) with a bit of foreshadowing for the future specials (what’s this about a gate?).

Budget wise (not that I'm obsessing) trapping the regulars in second long pockets of time meant that the wedding extras didn't need to be around for most of the shoot but also lent these scenes an justifiable and plausable intimacy (unlike, say, pretending that it's a Sunday). This kind of time trap is actually a fairly untapped sci-fi concept as far as I know -- only Star Trek's Wink of an Eye springs to mind (though a couple of other Treks featured pockets of time being sped up and down) -- and the rendering -- the repeated shot of a horse race -- tastefully concise if slightly surreal.

From a film studies perspective I was very impressed with the way that, while the Doctor remained an active presence in his scenes, the point of view mainly stayed specifically with the regulars. I was also pleased that Sarah Jane wasn’t simply relegated to companion status in her own series, realising herself that the ring was the source of the Trickster’s power and that Dalton wasn’t all there. There we odd moments in there in which we saw a return of the character as an independent figure with proper moments of wit rather than mumsy musings, and when the emotional suckerpunch came in knowing she was going to have to sacrifice her man for the good of the world Elizabeth Sladen was just devastating.

As if you hadn’t realised already, I’m fairly convinced this was the best story The Sarah Jane Adventures has produced since the first series and, yes, the perfect expression of what the series is capable of when it stops worrying about trying to keep down with its supposed target audience and just tells a proper story. I would be interested to know what kids made of the climax with Havers the one to properly beat the trickster and Sarah Jane’s teary march from the altar. I was in tears. The Sarah Jane Adventures never does that either.

I complained that after Children of Earth that the production team didn’t seem have brought the same sense of occasion to the kids spin-off. The Wedding of Sarah Jane proved that it is possible, but instead of the darkness of Torchwood, this spin-off can be infused by a sense of wonder, the wonder in the eyes of the kids as they toured the console room at the end (a perfect commemoration of the soon to close Blackpool exhibition where thousands of children in the real world must had the same expression as they stepped through the TARDIS shaped door for all these years).

Now, let’s keep it up shall we?

Ever So Lo-lo-lo-la-Lonely

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Mad Woman In The Attic 

The character of Rani Chandra is one I've never wholeheartedly warmed to since she was introduced in the last series. Nothing but admiration for Anjli Mohindra and her acting abilities but the series hasn't really explored Rani's ambitions as a journalist and her desire to follow in the footsteps of Sarah Jane Smith. Until now. In referring to what is regarded as one of the landmarks in feminist literary criticism by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar “The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.”, I wonder if writer Joseph Lidster was playing with us by using such an evocative title or was he actually attempting to beef up the subtext about the female characters. Judging by his two part story, I have to take my hat off to a writer who makes an effort to examine some of Gilbert and Gubar's thesis that all female characters in male-authored texts can be categorized as either the “angel” or the “monster" within the format of a children's drama.

Episode One immediately throws you off balance with that opening caption of 'Ealing London 2059' and director Alice Troughton's camera prowling around the gloomy interior of said attic. It's only as the young Adam finds the symbolic madwoman declaring she's Rani Chandra in the pre-titles that Lidster seals the deal on the representation of female anxiety that runs through the entire story. The attic in 2059 and the madwoman that inhabits it are a visual symbol and representation of the younger Rani's loneliness, jealousy and bitterness at being superseded by her fellow investigators, and particularly by the absent Maria and by that other madwoman in the attic, Sarah Jane Smith. It's also telling that Lidster wrote last year's Mark Of The Berserker in which the story explored the relationship between Clyde and his father and black masculine representations. Here, he gets a chance to put Rani centre stage and finally let us see just how this young woman feels about Maria, Sarah and how she relates to the boys/men in the story.

The device of using an older version of Rani to narrate the story works superbly and Episode One benefits greatly from an especially intense performance from Souad Faress. She is completely mesmerising. The older Rani is pretty much the subconscious made flesh, articulating the character's regrets at a decision made 50 years previously and which the audience does not yet know about. There is that beautiful shot where Troughton overlays the dark world of 2059 with the light, Sarah Jane, Clyde and Luke populated attic of 2009 to impress upon us quite how cataclysmic this loss is. I love the fact that the older Rani pulls no punches in describing Sarah Jane as 'mysterious and moody. You did not want to get on the wrong side of her' and presents a view of the character that is fairly atypical and properly represents what most of us would think of her if we ever crossed her path. It makes a change from the series often rather sycophantic view of Sarah Jane and does reflect the dichotomy of the 'angel' and 'monster' female subjectivity that Gilbert and Gumar's book discusses.

Like Rochester's mad wife locked away in Thornfield Hall, the Rani in the attic unravels a narrative in which her own female subjectivity, passionate, rebellious and uncontrollable, becomes the focus of the story. It's her repressed anger at not being taken seriously that drives the episode and her eventual journey to Danemouth. With this we also get to understand Rani's past life and this adds some welcome and long overdue dimensions to the character. Sam Lloyd, an old friend she reacquaints herself with, is just as resentful at Rani for her tales of the Sarah Jane gang but as we learn in the rest of the story it is precisely because of her telling such tales that she initialises and perpetuates the narratives in 2009 and 2059.

The relationship to male figures in the story is an interesting one. Essentially, Clyde and Luke, much as Rani would seem to love them, could be seen as agents of cultural restriction, eroding her confidence, especially when they brag about Maria becoming the new Sarah Jane. In much the same way, Harry the Danemouth Pleasure Park caretaker, restricts and controls the alien Eve. It's ironic that our first sight of him is where he is standing next to a sign that reads 'First Aid' and 'Lost Children' as he greets Rani and the notion of lost children extends beyond Eve to embrace Rani, Sam Lloyd and even Sarah Jane herself. This sums up his role in the story, as an obsessed patriarch who feels he needs to suppress what is in effect Eve's emergence into womanhood through images of play and television created by the Ship.

As he introduces himself, 'I'm the caretaker, I'm meant to be here' then his job description is rather like all those repressive fathers in old fairy tales, guarding the submerged female sexuality of the Eve and Rani characters beneath traditional, orthodox male formulas. And yet we detect in his reverie, as he looks at his younger self in a photograph, that he sees the function of the Pleasure Park is now redundant, the liberating notion of imaginative play and pleasure has become an outmoded concept. He blames the credit crunch - a symbol of over zealous patriarchy if ever there was one and a subtle acknowledgement that that even the pleasure of this series of The Sarah Jane Adventures has struggled to get to the screen through a particular lack of abundance of cash. Brian Miller, coincidentally the husband of Lis Sladen, is great as the troubled Harry and his reaction to Rani's direct approach to 'something hidden in the Haunted Mine' articulates more about the male fear of burgeoning female power than any library full of Victorian gothic novels.

There is also all that rich symbolism of the magic mirror kicking around in the story, with imagery suggesting Disney's wonderful animated Snow White, and where the truth of Eve's condition is displayed. It's a metaphor for control - from its reflection of Eve's image to control other people to its refraction and reshaping of Eve and Rani's femininity. The mirror constructs and deconstructs female subjectivity and reflects how the two women articulate their emotions within the story. It presents their potential for transformation and what they wish or fear to become. In the end of the story Eve's reflection is the machine intelligence of her spaceship that will give her freedom and it is also that machine's reflection which grants Rani's wish to be totally alone and wipes her friends from the timeline. The mirror, and by extension the female Ship, become the engine of desire for Eve and Rani.

The figure of Eve, beyond the mirror, reflects the truth back to Rani. Right down to her desires ('Zac Efron…he is fit') and the need to articulate them with a young woman who will empathise and understand. It's a conversation that you wouldn't imagine Rani ever having with her parents, Sarah Jane or the boys. Beautifully played by Eleanor Tomlinson, Eve is yet another lost child of the Time War (and note that this is complete with a shot of her looking into the mirror, telling the 'truth' of her life) and is adrift on Earth. At the same time, Luke discusses a similar situation with Sam, revealing Sam's own lonely disenfranchisement from the world. However, the twist in the first episode is that Sam has been 'possessed' by Eve's Ship and has, it transpires, been the agent to bring Rani to Danemouth. The truth hurts, naturally, and Episode One climaxes with Eve, a time sensitive, showing her Rani a skewed vision of her pain at not being taken seriously by Sarah Jane and the others, her pivotal denial of them and her horror at what she will become - the mad old woman of Bannerman Road.

Episode One is a stunning 25 minutes of drama but Episode Two does fall short simply because Lidster has to explain the set up and resolve it. It's a little rushed and cramped, doesn't quite know where to end and perhaps ties everything up a little too neatly. It was inevitable that he would return the series to its status quo by the end of the second installment. How he gets there is interesting and exciting. Once we get past the very pleasing flashback sequences (the clips from the classic series are particularly welcome) of Sarah Jane's life as the Ship scans her timeline, we're left with two very tantalising moments. The 'he is returning' image of the TARDIS materialising in the attic and the Ship describing and desiring 'the darkness' she's seen in Sarah's mind. It's more of the painful truth that Eve's race clearly paid for in the Time War and that creates a great deal of anxiety in our main characters, particularly Rani. This reflection of the truth is also all about the need to change as each character sees a reflection of themselves and their egos. It culminates in that utterly wonderful sequence of the two Rani's looking into the mirror, distraught, finishing each other's sentences and in outright denial of their futures. As well as the foretelling of the Doctor's arrival to Sarah, we have Luke defending himself to Sam and their discussion about Sam's friendship with Rani and the truth about Eve.

The scene in the Haunted Mine brings emotions to a boiling point and Eve, once she's free, is also free of Harry's demonising of her female power and free of the Ship's correcting influence. The fear of unbridled female sexual power is a classic theme of fairy tales and their patriarchal desire to control it. Again, we see the themes of Gilbert and Gubar's book in that both Rani and Eve represent the need to exorcise the 'madwoman in the attic' - here the difference between uncontrollable and volatile pubescence (that results in Eve going out of control and Rani wiping her friends from the time line) and a mature liberation and authority (Eve's reintegration with the Ship and the resulting union between her and Sam and Rani's restoration of the time line and her future family). Playtime is indeed over.

A superb story, beautifully directed and acted, with a stunning score from Sam Watts and full of very rich themes but by the time the black hole in Sarah's mind gets a mention you realise that Lidster also has to fulfill a brief to bring K9 back into the series just in time for next week's Tennant fest. So, K9 conveniently gets his arse out of the black hole in order for Eve's Ship to draw off its power (the black hole, not K9's arse) and he manages to irritate the hell out of Mr. Smith into the bargain. Improbable is the word. Eve gets a cute boyfriend in Sam and a concerned father with Harry and buggers off into space leaving Rani alone. It all works out in the end, with Adam turning out to be Eve's son and restoring the time line. Alice Troughton again uses a lovely device at the end of the episode to show how Rani's future will turn out as the gang all crowd round K9 for a photo op and the scene dissolves into a sweet redemptive coda featuring the older Rani, her son and grandson and mentions of Luke and Maria. The future seems to have turned out fine.

In Liverpool on Saturday

Neil at Scyfilove.com attended the preview screening of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith at Liverpool One today (lucky thing, I was working!) and managed to get this brilliant video interview with Tommy Knight and Anjili Mohindra.

If you didn't love the show before, you will after hearing their enthusiasm. No spoilers but lots of revelations I'm sure we've not heard anywhere else about behind the scenes hijinks.

It's like being witness to the first time the eyepatch joke was told.