K-9 and Company

Sarah Jane arrives at her Aunt Lavinia's cottage, but she isn't there, the locals are all highly suspicious, she receives K9 in the post and young Brendan comes to stay with her.

The plot is a little on the thin side, and has been mentioned before the boundaries of the show's format at that time would have prevented a series going very far. For this episode the Pagan villagers work really well.

That said I find K-9 and Company hugely watchable, I suppose for reasons of nostalgia, it has become my official Christmas wrapping show, it goes on, out comes the Baileys, it does have a very festive feel to it.

The acting is a little on the patchy side, most of the performances dare I say it are a little on the theatrical side, but still enjoyable and in keeping with the script, that said I love Juno Baker, played by Linda Polan, she was great fun.

I still love those opening credits and music too!

Not to be taken too seriously, but lots of fun, 7/10

Most of the other reviewers here can't seem to get past the theme song--yeah, it's silly but hardly something you would want to commit suicide over! The producer John Nathan Turner wanted a Hart To Hart opening credit sequence and that was a bit of a bad idea considering that the two leads in this are a woman and a mechanical dog! However, there is something bizarrely funny about it that acually draws you in. Maybe it's the camera zooming in on K-9 sitting on a stone fence--just how the hell did he get up there?! All of that aside, the actual story of witchcraft in the English countryside is rather fun stuff. There is some nice nightime atmosphere surrounding the coven's ceremonies and the actors who portray the various locals are all well cast. The only real negative is the short running time which is why there is not a lot of tension built. If one reads the novel it can be seen there was much more going on in the background to create tension but this does an acceptable job. Anyone who takes this too seriously or gets mad over this needs to relax and take a few deep breaths. This is great fun in the solid tradition of Doctor Who and it is too bad it never became a series.

After wading through several ideas for Doctor Who's one `official' spin-off (including a UNIT series I believe), John Nathan-Turner decided to base a series on K9. After all, there were times when the metal dog had received more fan mail than Tom Baker.

In short, the pilot episode has an older and wiser Sarah Jane Smith returning to her home village. She finds a box that the Doctor sent her years ago containing K9 Mark 3. Being the nosy investigative journalist she is, Sarah Jane soon become involved in stopping the activities of a coven of witches. Thank goodness she has K9 and her geeky cousin Brendan helping her.

It doesn't look promising from the first second of the theme song (something I'm sure Nathan-Turner wrote during lunch one day), and the plot is not all that engaging. In fact, there are times it seems you're watching bits of some of the Earthbound Doctor Who episodes cobbled together. Perhaps because of these factors, K9 & Company didn't make it to Episode 2.

For completists only.

I rather enjoyed this pilot episode of this proposed "Doctor Who" spinoff series. Too bad the BBC didn't pick it up as a series because I think it showed promise.

So K9 was written out of Doctor Who and with the furore from the fans and the media, the producers gave him a spin off show and teamed him with Sarah Jane Smith.

It seems not much attention was paid as to who this series was aimed at. It looks like there was no type of focus group evaluation, it was just quickly green-lit into production.

The final result, a mish mash of ideas that forgot K9 was popular with kids. Therefore a witches coven story line that harks back to Pertwee era Doctor Who might not be the wisest of moves.

For years K9 & Company stuck out like a sore thumb in the Doctor Who canon. Almost a quarter of century later, Russell T Davies effectively tried a second pilot, pushing Sarah Jane to the forefront, surrounding her with some kids and K9 pushed to the background. Even the Doctor turned up a few times.

In essence this pilot provided a bridge to the Sarah Jane Adventures.