Allow me to paint you a picture.
The year is 1981, earlier in the year Doctor Who’s critically acclaimed season 18 finally brought an end to Tom Baker’s multi award winning run on the show, and just a few days ago the finale of Blake’s 7’s first era aired, bringing tears to the eyes of all who watched it. British televised science fiction is at its peak, and the stage is set for something new to rise up, and capture the hearts and souls of the nation.
I bet you can already hear the theme song in your head.
With just a letter and a number, K9 & Company captured the hearts of millions across the UK. Gone were the offputting beats and noises of Doctor Who’s theme (look it up, I’m sure your parents will remember it), replaced by a brilliant, chipper new theme song that kids on the playground couldn’t help but sing.
Taking cues from its soon-to-be-cancelled forefather’s ‘Pertwee Era’, instead flying out across time and space like many science fiction shows at the time, K9 & Company brought us back down to earth. Our heroine Sarah Jane, played by the wonderful Elizabeth Sladen, heading to a small town in Gloucestershire, to unravel the mysteries of cults, ghostly apparitions, and strange lights in the sky. This all famously culminated in the season finale, finally lifting the curtains, and introducing her second most famous original antagonist, the daemon Maphistus.
Unfortunately, as the show went on, its ‘father show’, Doctor Who, would struggle. The new lead actor, Peter Davison, would failed to capture the hearts of audiences, and for a variety of reasons we don’t have time for right now, the show came to an abrupt end in 1983. Fan outcry eventually lead to the titular character appearing on the, now much more successful, K9 & Company, but even this wasn’t enough to bring it back from extinction.
Looking back on the first series of K9 & Company, while there’s a lot to love, it’s clear this was still them finding their feet. Luckily, once they’d found those feet at the end of series one, series two would see them running. It was this series that established the format of Sarah and K9 visiting a new place for each season, one year you might be dealing with small town mysteries in The Cotswolds, the next you’re battling for the fate of humanity in Manchester. Such a malleable format really kept the show fresh and exciting year after year.
This second series also brought with it the thing that truly cemented the series place, revitalising a classic enemy from Doctor Who in The Cybermen (unfortunately taking the place of a planned Cyberman series during the series of Doctor Who that aired just prior). This wouldn’t be the first crossover between the shows, but if something as big as The Cybermen could cross over, then what else could?
It’s now important to be aware of a phenomenon that struck Britain in the 1960s: Dalekmania. While they’re of course more famous for their many appearances in K9 & Company, you may be surprised to know that these fearsome pepper-pots actually originated in Doctor Who. Their design was instantly iconic, and became almost more popular than their show itself. All this is to say, when The Daleks made their first appearance in K9 & Company, the show’s success was all but assured. Series three brought with it in introduction to these new daleks, an episode with The Doctor, and the beginning of hints towards an even greater story going on in the background, eventually this all culminating in the late 80’s ‘Rani Saga’/
All good things must come to an end though, and as the show persisted through the 90s, many other series were coming from across the seas to take its place. The X-Files for example, is a clear rip-off of the concepts that K9 & Company was known for, though packaged in a sleek, new, American framing. K9 and Company needed something new, and the final episode, Survival, promised it, with K9 flung into the far future, and Sarah left, alone, in Ealing.
The plan took a while to execute, leading to a half-decade break, but when K9 came back, it’d be better than ever.
The show had been split in two - The Sarah Jane Adventures would follow Sarah and a new group of children as they faced threats in the present day, a series aimed squarely at a younger audience, while K9 would be flung into the far future, a world under a fascist regime, ruled by The Rani, a show with a more adult spin. These shows would tell stories in tandem, characters constantly crossing over from one to the other, the actions of one series having repercussions not seen until years down the line in the other series. It was a golden age for K9 media, and it would, unfortunately, come to an end with the tragic passing of Elisabeth Sladen.
The Sarah Jane Adventures aired what had been filmed of that final series, leaving many questions unanswered. Who was the mysterious man? Was The Rani actually Sarah’s sister? Etc etc etc.
But while The Sarah Jane Adventures came to an end, K9 would continue, persisting into the show we know, and love, today.