Farewell, Sarah Jane

There’s a brilliant moment in the 1975 Doctor Who storyline The Ark In Space when Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen), on a vital mission to save Earth from the evil insectoid Wirrn, gets stuck in a ventilator shaft.

There’s a brilliant moment in the 1975 Doctor Who storyline The Ark In Space when Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen), on a vital mission to save Earth from the evil insectoid Wirrn, gets stuck in a ventilator shaft. The Doctor (Tom Baker) hits on the ingenious ruse of goading her across the last few inches by telling her how thoroughly useless she is.

At least, brilliant is how I remember it being when I saw it aged ten. I remember empathising hugely with Sladen’s white fury over the grotesque unfairness of the Doctor’s insults (God, kids are good at identifying unfairness: it’s almost their raison d’être) but also I remember thinking how incredibly clever the Doctor was. You could tell it was just a ruse because of his conspiratorial grin and his half glance towards the camera, almost as if he were aware of you at home watching him.

The other day — 36 years on — I watched the same scene again with Boy and Girl on a CBBC special called My Sarah Jane. It was a terribly sad occasion because the programme was a short tribute to Elisabeth Sladen, best loved of all the Doctor Who assistants, who died last month of cancer aged just 65.

And I’m really not normally affected in this way by the deaths of TV personalities. But Sarah Jane was special because of the double impact she had on the lives of my generation — first in her chastely fanciable, older woman role as Jon Pertwee’s and then Tom Baker’s game but much put-upon assistant; subsequently, in her surrogate-mother role when she made a surprise return to TV, entertaining my generation’s offspring in the marvellous Doctor Who spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures.