K9 and Company

The two times that I have requested people send me their ideas for what I should review I have received some rather strange suggestions. The first one was Turkish ET, Badi. Now, this film is not particularly bad, it’s just a pure, total rip off of Stephen Spielberg’s ET, but in Turkish with no English subtitles and with the most terrifying version of ET you could possibly imagine. It looked like a brown, melted mannequin with a dwarf trying to escape from inside. The second suggestion I received was to do a review of ‘Porn of the Dead’. I will let your imagination, curiosity and IMDB, help you fathom what that film was about and why I chose not to even watch it.

Now, with a great track record such as that, you can see why I asked, yet again, for things to review. This time, however, a friend of mine suggested something that has not received the total, critical raping that it deserves. It is the most ungodly, disastrous, awful, hate inducing production to carry the honour of being part of the Doctor Who universe and that includes Torchwood: Miracle Day. And so, with no further ado, ladies, gentlemen and members of the internet, I present to you the abomination that is K9 and Company.

Before I begin, it’s time for a brief history of where this comes from and what it is. Doctor Who is the longest running, most successful science fiction show of all time. From 1963 to the present day, albeit with a 16year gap from 1989 to 2005, the show has been a staple for the BBC1 Saturday slots, neatly blurring the line between children’s show and family entertainment. It has been fun, silly, scary and traumatising, emotional, frivolous and filled with enough metaphors and messages to make the writers of Star Trek blush. So, being so very successful, both ratings wise and commercially, it was only to be expected that spin offs were to be made. So throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, comic strips were produced and sold by Marvel under license from the BBC to huge success. Target published novelisations of the stories; whole new stories were created and published, creating the largest book series of any characters the world has ever seen. Big Finish have, at time of writing, made over 160 full cast, full story Audio dramas, the majority being four or 5 part stories, completely original and having used doctors 4 through 8, and as the BBC are catching on even Doctors 9-11 are joining in. On television, The Sarah Jane adventures were hugely popular, as is Torchwood, Totally Doctor Who, Doctor Who confidential and K9, despite their hugely varied target audiences. For the most part, slap the DW logo on the show somewhere and it will be more popular than the cure for cancer. During the late nineties, early 2000’s, there was even a stage adaptation of show to critical acclaim. Yet one show, and one show alone, broke this mould. It broke it and then gave it a golden shower.

In 1981 Doctor Who was having problems. Sarah Jane had left, Adric had turned up and generally the show was now on a steady slope to nowhere. After 7 years the familiar face of Tom Baker, who had become a national treasure, was replaced by ‘the wet vet’ Peter Davison. The show had a minor ratings slump and the producers of DW needed to spice up interest. So they gave birth to the idea of k9 and Company, featuring Sarah Jane and k9, solving mysteries on earth and being a defender of the planet without the help of the doctor. It was the great grandmother to the Sarah Jane Adventures but with an awful, early eighties theme tune that sounds like a cat running along a MIDI keyboard. The titles show everything that is wrong with the show. It was made in the early 80’s, computers were in, and if your titles didn’t have poorly made images of your made characters in Grey and green basic line drawings then your show was not it. Look at Sapphire and Steel. It starts with a black and green, computer generated sine curve worming its way across screen before computer generated line drawings of metals are thrown at you, but whereas Sapphire and Steel suited this, K9&C doesn’t. The credits carry on with random shots of Sarah Jane looking up and looking inquisitive and with the added bonus of images of k9 awkwardly balanced on dry stone walls or flashing its lights.

No series was ever commissioned, but we do have more than a 2 minute credits sequence to review. A 50 minute pilot was made and aired on bbc1 in late 1981, receiving 8.4million viewers and totally failing in gaining enough interest in warranting a complete series. It is fairly easy to see why nothing ever came of this show, and it is this: Nothing really happens that’s new. Sure, it’s Sarah Jane and K9, but its just a carbon copy of the doctor and Sarah Jane except with less sexual tension and the grating voice of k9 more prevalent.

It starts, like most late seventies, early eighties Who did, with imagery that was both weird, satanic and a little bit Whaaaa?? Like ‘The brain of Morbius’, ‘The Image of the Fendahl’ and ‘Black Orchid’, this story is story is heavily gothic, but this time with down and out Satanism and it gets linked to the disappearance of Sarah’s aunt. Sarah comes in to live at this grand, massive house owned by her aunt, previously used in a Doctor Who episode studio set from her small house in Croydon, which is easily an improvement. After a few pointless scenes of introducing 6characters in 5 minutes, we see the human companion, a young, fresh out of boarding school (drop out wana-be) and the two discover K9 III in a crate, left in an attic for years, in Croydon. Now, this is the man who couldn’t drop Sarah off in Croydon and in fact left her in Aberdeen. How did the doctor leave a well timed, well placed and properly delivered parcel to a small, dark attic in Croydon, but couldn’t place a person in a large, modern town. Okay, maybe Croydon’s not large. Okay it’s not modern. But I digress...

From there on in, it’s a rather compact doctor who story with the exciting, high budget elements. There is the main plot of the disappearing aunt and then with a subplot that is pretty much ‘Oooh K9, look what amazing things you can do!’ with the child making him analyse soil to help with the local farm, general larking about and solving simple puzzles. And all this is done through the power of technobabble. Not fun babble, such as ‘reverse the polarity of neutron flow’, but is instead ‘He...it...he has a crystal neutrino brain and a laser drive reader system for maximum efficiency and durability, Brilliant!!’ This isn’t science fiction, or even entertainment. This is the most boring technobabble I have ever heard. It somehow sucks the silly fun out of the silliest, most ridiculous style of writing that there can possibly be. It is just annoying.

With another 35 minutes the go, I will admit, I stopped focusing. Only few Doctor Who episodes are do dull that they let your concentration drift off. There is always something going on and there’s no way that you lose focus on the plot. From here on in, however, the story manages to drag on and on. It’s not that it’s a poor idea for a story, Satanism, missing relatives, a creepy, old fashioned village who have ties with witch craft. This should be more than fertile ground to create a fast paced, exciting, entertaining story line that would keep you trapped to the screen, but I kept drifting off. I can tell you that during the remaining 35 minutes I figured out that I have alive for longer than the majority of people to have ever lived, and that I am ever so slightly underweight for my height. I also solved a physics puzzle that had been bugging me for a week. This show is dull.

There are some positives in this though. Being Elizabeth Sladen, the acting is sublime and is as subtle and powerful as she ever was in anything she ever acted in. The use of K9, although a bit laboured, is still fun and it still is as camp and silly as ever and every time John Leeson says anything in that silly, Zippye-esque voice I revert to being 6 years old and giggle quietly in the childish corner of my brain.

This isn’t a terrible, horrid peice of television, but for a piece of television that has the doctor who brand plastered on it, it’s not great. Sure, it’s better than ‘TimeLash’ or ‘Time of the Rani’ and is definitely better than ‘Twin Dillemma’, but it’s by no means a good story in comparison to some of the mediocre who episiodes and, compared to The Sarah Jane Adventures, it looks silly, foolish and slow.

And as my cat falls asleep on my lap as I write this I think it’s time to say, over and out. 

For Stuart Timmins, a friend of mine, who requested this to be reveiwed. All the best in New Zealand Stu.