The Sarah Jane Adventures Executive Producer Russell T Davies has been speaking to SFX recently about the appearance of former Doctor Who companion Jo Grant in the upcoming series 4.
Jo Grant will be reprised for the first time on television by actress Katy Manning; it is 37 years since Jo was last seen on TV, when she decided to leave the Doctor and travel with Professor Cliff Jones to the Amazon.
She’ll be returning in Series 4 of The Sarah Jane Adventures in the episode Death of the Doctor – along Matt Smith also appears in the episode.
Over the years, Jo Grant has appeared in various spin-off media, most notably novels from Virgin Books and BBC Books. These appearances aren’t something that RTD considers canon, it would seem…
We talked about it a lot beforehand,†says Davies. “I know there’s a feeling that she’d have got divorced, and there was a theory that she’d be living on her own in Wales in a little cottage – some of the novels did this – and you think, ‘Nice idea, but actually that’s absolutely betraying the way we left her’.
We left her with the promise of happiness, of adventure, of love and joy, and you can’t be cynical and undercut that by saying, ‘Oh, she’s a drug addict now! Her husband left her, she’s lonely, her life is bitter’. That’s just interfering with classic Doctor Who and rewriting what we were promised. So I was absolutely strict about that.
Series 4 of The Sarah Jane Adventures is currently expected to start on Monday, 11th October on BBC One; meanwhile, Russell T Davies speaks in more depth about the new series in the next issue of SFX, out next week.
Drug addict. For God’s sake! Why is it, with alot of the spin-off media, people insist on trying to make Doctor Who into something it’s not. I got about halfway through a ‘Short Trips’ collection before I felt like blowing my brains out after reading story after story full of drugs and overly gruesome murders and thing just generally trying to be too ‘adult’. That’s not what Who is.