Adventures of a lifetime

And so the final episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures was transmitted on Tuesday afternoon at 5.15pm on the CBBC channel. Part Two of The Man Who Never Was completed the curtailed run of the Fifth Season. There was talk that the series might continue without its leading lady. It’s happened before. Blake’s 7 survived, after the departure of Gareth Thomas, as did Taggart, on the death of Mark McManus. But the BBC finally took the opportunity to pull the plug. Credit to Russell T Davies, who fought hard to keep the show on air when it was threatened with cancellation earlier in its life. I believe the BBC took some persuading to make the show in the first place. Bringing back a character, popular in the Seventies, to front a programme aimed primarily at twelve to fourteen-year-olds doesn’t seem like an obvious choice! But it seemed to work, though, in real life, one would no doubt question the motives of a sixty-year-old woman hanging out with a bunch of school children, even if some of the children in question did look as though they were in their early twenties themselves! Yasmin Paige, as Maria Jackson, and then Anjli Mohindra, as Rani Chandra, certainly gave the adventures in which they appeared that additional bounce! But The Sarah Jane Adventures belonged to the late Elisabeth Sladen and, in the present economic climate, it is unlikely we shall see its kind again in the foreseeable future.

It’s a shame really. Programmes such as The Sarah Jane Adventures were commonplace once upon a time. Everyone took them for granted. ITV were always trying to create a winning formula with which they could rival Doctor Who in the mid-to-late Sixties and throughout the Seventies. For the most part, they were as successful. The obvious examples are the string, no pun intended, of hugely popular-to-this-day Gerry Anderson puppet series. They began in the Fifties, of course, but took off when Gerry and then-wife Sylvia turned their hands to science fiction. Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, Joe 90 and The Secret Service were all hugely exciting. Live action series were equally as popular. Sexton Blake, Freewheelers, Timeslip, Ace Of Wands and The Tomorrow People all left their mark, as did UFO and Space: 1999 when the Andersons put Supermarionation behind them. Peter Davison’s first acting role was in The Tomorrow People, up against the very series he would eventually helm! We’ve seen their like since. The Demon Headmaster and Moondial were two such. Ironically, other than Sarah Jane, the last were Dark Season and Century Falls in the early Nineties, both excellently written by Russell T Davies. Children are being sold short without such fantasy stimulation, and televisual creativity will suffer further because of the demise of this genre!