K9 and Company: A Girl's Best friend - Ranking N/A (but somewhere around #270)

 

K9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend

(One-Off Special, K9 and Sarah Jane, 28/12/1981, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editors: Anthony Root and Eric Saward, writer: Terence Dudley, director: John Black)

Rank: N/A (but around #270 if I had to pick)

 ‘I bought me a dog and my dog bought me 

I made it a kennel under yonder tree 

The dog said 'affirmative' and shot baddies twenty-three 

Brendan said 'Fiddle-i-fee!'

Is a robot dog really a girl’s best friend? Especially Sarah Jane. I mean, she’s a journalist who spends her job sneaking in undercover and trying to make criminals up to no good take her seriously. The last thing she needs is a dog on wheels following her around. Equally K9’s the most intelligent creature on Earth (when the Doctor’s not there). Admittedly he’s not very mobile, but does he even need to be? Plug him into the mains and watch him take out the computer software of the world’s baddies and he’d be unstoppable. They don’t really belong together. If you think that’s an odd mismatch though, that’s nothing on K9 and production assistant just turned producer John Nathan-Turner. He’s inherited a programme he wants to make his mark on, so he can be taken seriously by his peers. The last thing he wants is a tin dog that ‘s there for all the children: just imagine K9 in the two most recent Who stories ‘Keeper of Traken’ or ‘Logopolis’ and you can’t, he just doesn’t fit. Trouble is, K9 is so popular the producer can’t just axe him outright, there would be an outcry and (probably) letters in parliament! So he hits on the brainwave of giving K9 his own programme, for a more junior audience, away from the main show, with a familiar face to keep a few old Dr Who fans watching too. That way he can tell the viewers writing steaming letters into him don’t panic – K9’s not gone, he’s just getting a different home, that’s all. JNT even won a prestigious slot for his new ‘pet’ project over the Christmas holidays, the time when non-Who children are most likely to be watching, a time generally reserved for DW omnibus repeats. Problem solved then! Well…not quite. There never was a second episode of this show. Many fans want to forget there was even a first.

Such is the tail (sorry tale) of ‘classic Dr Who’s one and only screened spin-off. Others were mooted, including the Doctors’ evil brother (an idea from William Hartnell, no less), UNIT, various Dalek franchises and Oak and Quill from ‘Fury From The Deep’ would you believe (even though one of the was mute and the most memorable thing either of them did was kill someone with their bad seaweed breath – hardly a classic starting point and even Big Finish haven’t turned that into a show yet). K9 and Co isn’t the best then but is far from the worst idea and it could have been good: two years on from its highest ever audience ratings Dr Who was undeniably popular and there’s room enough in the Whoniverse for another series or three. ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ shows how it could have been done: in a series told from a child (bordering on teenager’s) point of view. The problem is JNT kind of loses interest in his great new concept there, being far more interested in the adult scripts of Tom Baker’s last run and the first ones for ‘his’ doctor Peter Davison. This is, effectively, the launch of a whole new show, one which only mentions the Dr very briefly at the beginning. To work it needs all the right people working overtime – instead it’s treated as kind of an afterthought. Writer Terence Dudley was hired as a safe pair of hands JNT knew well, but his work was as adult as anyone working on Who gets: gloomy dystopian government officials shouting t each other series ‘Doomwatch’ was his co-creation, alongside Cybermen originators Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler. If any series could be said to send adults hiding behind the sofa in the 1970s its that one, full of existential and highly plausible scientific dread. He’s not a natural candidate for getting into the minds of the nations’ 8 year olds and giving them what they most want to see: K9-alien battles. You kind of get the impression from this story that Dudley has never met anyone younger than middle-age in decades and they’re far more of an alien race than any Dr Who monster. What does he write as a plot for ostensibly the most kiddie-friendly Dr Who-related episode made so far? Black magic in a sleepy English village, including devil worship and human sacrifice. There’s even a chilling scene where Sarah Jane nearly gets run off the road in a tractor that’s not exactly graphic but scary enough to make Mary Whitehouse choke on her brussel sprouts. Dudley is, as it happens, a pretty decent writer of serious heavy drama and I like his Dr Who scripts more than most fans (they tend to go wrong for how they’re realised on screen, not the scripts themselves). But he has almost no sense of humour: his famous works are almost all grim. There are attempts at jokes in this pilot because it’s made for children and that’s how everyone thinks children’s telly works, but that’s all they are: attempts, there’s not one even half-laugh there and yet still the script keeps trying to be funny anyway, over and over, to make sure we get the joke (the closest is K9 not understanding what garden gnomes are. Seriously, that’s the highlight). As it happens Dudley’s script editor for this story is new recruit Eric Saward on his first ever Dr Who job: in future stories he’d have told JNT to stuff this script where the sun doesn’t shine (his wasn’t the most peaceful of eras) but for now he’s having to grin and bear it – even so, we know from later scripts that his heart isn’t in childish frothy nonsense either (partly why JNT hired him in the first place): he likes the dark, the grim, the violent. Doesn’t feel very children’s Christmas TV friendly so far does it?

Ad it isn’t. The biggest trouble with ‘K9 and Company’ is that K9 doesn’t fit this show either, feeling shoe-horned into a more adult contemporary drama that never got made. You get the sense that Dudley frankly, doesn’t like K9 either, keeping him away from the plot for most of it, which was kind of the point of the series in the first place (John Leeson tries so hard to make this script work, but there’s less for him to do than most Dr Who stories). The first draft even had K9 as secretly evil and working for The Master, to better tie in with ‘Logopolis’ and ‘Castrovalva’ (the Dr Who stories transmitted either side of this one), which would have been a lot more interesting than what we got, but isn’t exactly a sign of how much the writing team love this character. And they should: K9’s great and steals practically every scene he’s in when he’s allowed to, mostly thanks to John Leeson’s deadpan comedy timing. He’s one of the best ideas DrWho ever had, so its sorry to see him effectively confined to his kennel and made to sing Christmas Carols instead of being brilliant and saving the day in a Droctory type of way, which s how they should have done this story.

Dudley seems to hate children even more though, making Sarah’s ‘ward’ Brendon the biggest twit ever seen in the series (think Harry Sullivan in his youth if he’d been to an even posher public school but without the big heart that means you love him for his clumsiness anyway. Or an even blander, more irritating Adric). Even allowing for the fact that we’re dealing in a fictional series that’s meant to be larger than life and not always realistic, you’ve never met anyone like Brendan in your life, ever: he accepts every unlikely scifi scenario the plot demands of him without question (his curiosity about K9 lasts approximately thirty seconds) and he has the unique ‘gift’ for being both pro-active and incredibly useless, blundering into trouble, even and especially after being warned about it, a talent that makes Susan, Jo and Peri look positively cautious. The ‘jokes’ that are in this programme are nearly all at his expense, which is a problem because he’s still the closest the main viewing audience have to an identification figure compared to the glammed up adult lead and robot dog. Watching this for the first time, a fair bit older than the intended target audience and from a generation younger, even I was incredibly insulted on their behalf. At least the scenes feel vaguely child-friendly when K9’s around though: the vast majority of this story is adults hanging around doing nothing but talking – take the opening scene, which is Sarah Jane’s Aunt Lavinia and a neighbour, both of whom we haven’t met, nattering and giving the most blatant bits of exposition you’ll ever see about who Sarah Jane is and the tin dog-shaped present that’s waiting for her. Or the opening credits, which feature the world’s silliest theme tune (‘K9…K9!’) set to a surprisingly adult set of shots of Sarah Jane jogging and sipping wine, like she’s in Dynsasty or Dallas. That schizophrenia between light and dark, adult and childish, is usually one of the strongest features about Dr Who (the reason it works for such a family audience) but it’s the one big reason why this story never quite works, partly because it’s almost all talking and no action and partly because to watch it with a child is to have to explain about all sorts of uncomfortable subject matters like Devils, black magic, paganism sacrificial virgins and all sorts of other unpleasant things (and over the Christmas holidays too).

Thankfully there’s Sarah Jane and Dudley’s pretty good at writing for her, even though he never actually did in the series proper. She’s everything she used to be – curious, plucky, vulnerable, smart – and without the Doctor to share the screen with and a co-star whose, basically, grounded she gets lots of opportunities to show off what she can do. Elisabeth Sladen may have had her doubts about coming back to make this pilot privately, ending up typecast all over again just as she was beginning to shrug off her reputation as a Who-girl, but she’s never better than here, growing to fill the shoes of the beloved experienced series regular rather than be the new girl trying to get up to speed with the others as in the past. Seeing this story you’re reminded just what a pro-active companion she was compared to most others and it feels entirely natural that she drives the plot on, without there just being a Doctor or Tardis-shaped hole in the middle of this story. You’re betting on her to get to the ‘truth’ of this mystery and see through the village screts, even though she’s hopelessly outnumbered and a stranger in town. The best scenes of this story are Sarah basically talking to herself and figuring stuff out - it’s when she has to share the screen with other people the story goes downhill.

You would have thought that having a journalist with a background in aliens would be a great starting point (it will be for ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’, which very much learnt its lessons from this pilot, even if adopted son Luke starts off being a bit too Brendan-like before they find a way of making him more interesting; note that Brendan isn’t mentioned once in that series even though we meet all sorts of other people from Sarah Jane’s past). . But no: this is a story that happens to her, a Daemons-style village that seems to be situated next to ‘The Wicker Man’, full of superstitious locals who are running a coven, even the local authority figures and trying to scare her off. Sarah, of course, won’t be scared off easily, especially with a robot dog for company.  Basically a journalist is another way of saying ‘detective’ and those sorts of shows were in during 1981; the plot is recognisably like something in ‘The Sweeney’ but with Tractors to roll over rather than cars and a grumpy robot dog instead of John Thaw, though it’s a tight squeeze with her character and way out of touch with what K9’s all about.  Even this idea could have worked though if they’d played up what must surely have been the starting point: the juxtaposition of humans conjuring up supernatural entities and a logical robotic machine investigating them. Very much like ‘The Daemons’ in fact, still regarded in 1981 as one of the high points of the series, perhaps with a similar middle ground between whether magic is real or just science under a different name. There’s even the clever nod that the ‘hecate’ Goddess the coven are worshipping was accompanied by a dog of her own, making you think we’re going to be in for some spirit-dog on robot-dog action that never comes (indeed it’s never even mentioned: viewers of the slightly later 1980s wondered why they were summoning up the world’s most hopeless witch Heggarty-Haggarty). Somehow even those strands get lost, as K9 mostly gets confined to the house (or occasionally car) and its Sarah Jane who confronts the baddies.

The best scenes come in the middle of the episode when it feels as if the coven are more than they seem, that they really do have special powers or links to alien powers, that our heroes  really are in trouble. Dudley’s greatest gift as a writer is in writing for untrustworthy adults with ever-shifting motivations that you can’t pin down because what they’re saying makes sense. but viewers know instinctively you can’t trust – throw that into a child’s world, where youngsters are meant to be subservient to their elders and trust every word they say or they’re in trouble, and it’s far more terrifying to this pilot’s target audience than it would be to an adult (practically of the most beloved children’s fiction down the years are about children making good against unreliable adults). This is a particularly creepy village and the feeling of claustrophobia is well served as everyone turn out to be in on this village’s big secret: this all fits with my experiences of English village life, places where everyone knows your business and are naturally suspicious of outsiders (and nobody’s more an outsider than someone with an intergalactic pet dog). The locals aren’t the most thrilling supporting parts you’ve ever seen, but they’re also a lot better than the comedy yokel stereotypes of the UNIT days: these feel like real people with real motivations even if some of those motivations are a bit weird. Theres even a clever twist where the neighbours who have been so nice all story they can’t possibly be for real turn out to be (spoilers) erm, every bit as nice as they seem.

It looks good too: by 1981 Dr Who standards the location shooting is luxurious, making good use of Miserden a village in Goucestershire, standing in for the fictional Morton Harwood near the real Chipping Norton. So much of Earthbound Dr Who is set in London and when it isn’t 99% of the time its set in a city and it was a good idea to move out to the country, it helps ground ‘K9 and Co’ in reality in a way that the later Tom Baker stories (especially once Romana comes along and there are two timelords in the Tardis) aren’t. The setting of Winter solstice, the pagan times when the walls between our world and the next are traditionally thought to be thinner so ghouls and demons can break through more easily, is clever: its not quite Christmas but there’s a festive feeling in the air that makes it feel special, without having to stick in killer Christmas trees and all the trappings and much as continuous shooting in the dark in the modern series for no reason winds me up it adds to the atmosphere here of nights drawing in so its dark all the time. This is a story set in shadows, where you can’t quite see what’s going on and the scenes of satanic worship are the one thing story gets better than ‘The Deamons’ (because its suddenly not so silly when you can’t quite see what’s going on and how daft everyone looks dressed up). There are moments when it feels as if everything is coming together, when the stakes are higher and the jokes have stopped. But then, because this is meant for children, they have to throw in Brendan doing something silly.

Ultimately, it’s not enough. The plot does what it needs to do but not much more. There are no great wonderful scenes to go down in fan folklore (the closest is K9 discussing his features with Sarah Jane and Brendan trying to work out the science behind it all – and even that was better done with the 4^th Dr and Leela), there are no real surprises and the revelation at the end, particularly, is a real let down (there isn’t a very big list of suspects and basically its everyone: if this was a Sherlock Holmes story it wouldn’t even be a one cigarette problem, never mind a three-piper). While the idea is, at its deep core, a good one (I’m a fan of both the Sarah Jane Adventures’ and the under-rated ‘K9’ series from Australia, which is pitched a bit young and features some very irritating human children, but shows how K9 could have worked in a more child-friendly plot) and won the pilot high ratings (8.4million, not bad at all – ‘Logopolis’ highest episode, the second one, was only 7.7million), the execution leaves a lot to be desired, with most fans under-whelmed by it then and since. It was the BBC that killed the show off though, not the stars or fans or even the producer: boss Bill Cotton, who’d always been proud of the way Dr Who had grown on his watch, had been more than happy to commission this when JNT pitched it to him, but in a sign of things to come his replacement Alan Hart saw the show and particularly the pilot as a bit of an embarrassment. Dr Who itself was too popular to be in danger, but this pilot was an easy thing to put in a drawer and forget about and, well, JNT wasn’t going to fight that hard for it. Not many people were that upset over the demise of ‘k9 and Company’. It’s hard to see where a full series would have gone from here: would it have been a different village with covens each week? (That’s what the last scene hints at). The same locals turned good? Would there have been actual aliens? Had they tweaked the pilot so that it was more about Sarah Jane super sleuth, with K9 as her computer mastermind and comedy foil, with Brendan sent back off to school and a bunch of clever kids who believed in aliens, it could have been big (as of course it was when Sarah Jane Adventures did that). But no one outside the cast really cares about anything other than ratings, so you have this awful feeling that a full series might actually have been worse. A missed opportunity.

POSITIVES + This pilot had a lot of money spent on it. Admittedly most of its not spent particularly wisely, but there’s a glossiness about this pilot that stands out compared to DrWho seasons 18 and 19 either side of it. All that location filming, which in 1981 had to be done on more expensive film rather than videotape, puts it more in line with the American import series that were doing so well on British telly in 1981, partly because everyone in them always looked so glamorous and rich. They try the same with Sarah Jane in this story, giving her a posh makeover, which doesn’t work quite as well, but still: this one looks good on screen. With the sound down.  

NEGATIVES – Remember the days when K9 was the most sophisticated intelligent robot ever built? Well, apparently the makers of this pilot don’t, as they have him clumsily running into greenhouses right at the point when people need him to be quiet, running into a ladder and destroying a garden gnome. If you came to this episode without knowing the main series you’d think the Doctor hated Sarah Jane and sent K9 just to annoy her. It must be all that time being stuck in an attic in Croydon, its made him rusty.

Best Quote: K9 – ‘Your silliness is noted’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: For more larks with K9 and Sarah Jane see the K9 Annual 1983 (an extra on the DVD) which includes six new stories featuring the same cast as the pilot. It’s quite a good read actually, a cut above the average Dr Who annuals of this era (it even – shock horror – has a prediction of the future that actually happened, an article on how we might all be watching satellite television by 1990 and how one day there ‘might be as many as fifty channels to choose from’, which sure beats the articles about having bases on the moon and travelling the stars by the end of the 20^th century from the parent Who annuals) and fleshes out supporting characters like Aunt Lavinia (who actually appears in most of them), and Brendon (whose far less of a drip here) and strengthens the relationship between Sarah and K9 to the point where they’re almost a double act. Given the limited space the plots aren’t exactly taxing but in many ways are more inspired and certainly more original than the TV version. They’re a sort of stepping stone to ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ too, making good use of Sarah’s journalistic skills. ‘Powerstone’ concerns a missing skeleton found in an archaeological dig that apparently got up and walked off  and the stone of the title which causes hallucinations and a near brush with death in a car crash just like in ‘Planet Of the Spiders’. ‘The Shroud Of Azaroth’ does feature another human sacrifice in a sleepy village, but this time it’s an acting role gone wrong as a demon is summoned by accident and causes havoc on set (the director is one ‘George Speilberg’! When K9 has ambitions to act too Sarah Jane  tells him ‘I can’t see you playing the lead in ‘Gone With The Wind’ anytime soon’).  ‘Hound Of hell’ pits K9 against a proto ‘Hound Of The Baskervilles’ which is rather clever, although sadly K9 gets written out halfway through and ends up with ‘amnesia’ (this one feels most like a TV script that never got made, down to budget-saving decisions like this).’The Monster Of Loch Crag’ is more of the same, a spooky hotel on holiday and a Laird whose trying to scare people away  (which is K9 and Company at its most Scooby Doo-ish). By the time of  ‘Horror Hotel’ the repetition is getting a bit daft, another creepy tale of ghosts and ghouls and yet another human sacrifice in the story that most resembles the pilot. The annual then ends with it’s maddest story of the lot, ‘The Curse Of Kanbo-Ala’, which is clearly based on the curse of Tutankhamen with an archaeologist working in Egypt who comes a cropper and is haunted by a ghostly Indian with a big action sequence on board a train. Would this series have run and run with stories like these? Probably not, but almost any of them would have been preferable to the pilot we did get. 

Dave Martin alone also released four K9 spin-of books (again included on the DVD), written for a younger audience than normal in 1980 after the pilot had failed to go to series. It’s doubtful that any full episodes would have looked like this though: this is K9 having adventures in space in the future a long way from the black magic of the pilot story, travelling across the stars in his see-through spaceship called (what else?) K-Nel. The plots are simple and the language sparse but the (uncredited) colourful illustrations are positively gorgeous, leagues ahead of anything in the annuals or comic strips of the time and looking more like a 1970s prog rock album. ‘Zeta Rescue’ is my favourite, a gripping tense race against time that might contradict everything that actually happens in the series (the timelords can’t visit a Megellan prison ship for reasons known to themselves, so they choose a robot dog to get them out of trouble) but works well as a spin-off. Dea is a worthy companion in the Leela mould (her lack of clothing is really pushing the boundaries for a children’s book!) and The Megellans are a worthy foe, although annoyingly there are no illustrations of them and not much of a description so you have to imagine what they look like. The other three books are ‘The Missing Planet’ about an evil company turning populated worlds into mines (with a gorgeous opening illustration of space city Tellan as it used to be), ‘The Time Trap’ about a very Battlestar Galactica book about the search for a missing battle-cruiser that’s gone missing) and ‘The Beats Of Vega’ who are exactly the clichéd little green men Sydney Newman warned us about. The four stories were collected together as the Big Finish audiobook ‘The Adventures Of K9’ in 2013, read by John Leeson, although the stories are missing a lot without the pictures to go with them.

Finally, there’s an entire spin-off series made by co-creator Bob Baker with Australian television and first broadcast in 2009 with John Leeson returning to do the voice. Over shadowed by ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ and with a ‘regenerated’ model because of BBC copyright who doesn’t look that much like ‘our’ K9, it’s a little bit childish and mostly mocked by fans. I rather like it though: it’s not as grownup as SJA but for its own niche its a neat twist on the ‘Famous 5’ stories about plucky children cut off from their old lives, their grumpy parent/guardian and their faithful dog, only in this case it’s the dog that’s the most powerful of the lot. With a lower budget than even ‘K9 and Company’ it’s easy to laugh at the alien designs especially and the way the storylines end up falling into clichés about teenagers growing up, but there’s a lot about this series to love with some excellent ideas and certainly some more realistic plots than ‘Torchwood’ ever managed. ‘Fear Itself’ is my favourite episode, a gritty story that pre-empts the London riots but taking place a couple of years early (and filmed in Australia!), with as many parallels to Dr Who proper as they can get away with (most of it taking place in a junkyard…) There was only ever one series, the franchise not having really clicked with the public on either side of the world the way its creators hoped and while Baker tried many times to get a new deal for the series his death in 2021 rather put an end to that idea. Still, because of the way Australian telly is run there’s a full twenty-six episodes out there to enjoy, which is around half of the Sarah Jane total (fifty-three).