I write from London, where I will be taking young F to the Doctor Who Experience this morning, after last night’s unexpected and very sad news that Elisabeth Sladen is no more. There are some lovely tributes to her already: see
For myself, she is the first Classic Who companion who I remember clearly. Numerous female fans have written of her importance as a role model for girls, but this was not absent from the way we boys related to her either – being the Doctor’s friend, the one who gets to travel with him for fun and danger, was a cause of envy and emulation. Her relationship with the Doctor taught me important lessons about mentoring which I try to implement in my life to this day. As I’ve commented before, her character really blossomed in the Sarah Jane Adventures when she acquired a group to mentor in her own turn, rather than being saddled with the chinless wonders she was given as comic relief in the first K9 spinoff and the 1990s Pertwee audios.
I’ve been trying to identify my own favourite Elisabeth Sladen moments. Her two farewells, of course, in The Hand of Fear and School ReunionPyramids of MarsDeath to the DaleksThe Monster of PeladonEnemy of the BaneSarah Jane Smith audio plays. But if you want to listen to a lesser-known jewel of Elisabeth Sladen, in I think her only appearance in the Whoniverse where she does not play Sarah or her double, I strongly recommend you get hold of Walking to Babylon (will cost you a fiver), one of the very first Big Finish audios, adapted by Jacqeline Rayner from a Kate Orman novel about Bernice Summerfield, where she plays the ancient priestess Ninan-ashtammu and does it superbly. There’s always more of her material out there if you know where to look.
The BBC faces a tough choice now about the Sarah Jane Adventures, in that apparently half of the next series had already been filmed. In my own view there are only two real options: leave it at the end of Series Four (as Big Finish left her at the end of their sequence of audios), or engineer some teachable moment about Sarah Jane’s own demise. The latter is much trickier, yet I somehow hope they do it, and do it well; Sarah Jane Smith and Elisabeth Sladen deserve no less.
I read Anna Karenina for the first time this year, and thought afterwards that I should probably save War and Peace for a little while, because after that there wouldn’t really be any more. I did sort of know when I started that Anna Karenina is accounted rather a good novel. But I was still struck by the ferocity with which I consumed it; I basically did nothing else but read from the moment I picked it up till the moment I was done.
One of the great joys of middle age, I think, is that books that are quite challenging for young adults — or at least that were challenging to me as a young adult — become easy page turners to a jaded reader who has had to struggle through many things that are harder to read than the hardest novel ever is.
My original plan was to read the novel before going to see the recent movie adaptation; in the event I concluded that the only way to squeeze the novel into a movie would be to ditch everything except the not-very-central titular romance. Would that they had turned Anna Karenina into three three hour films, and The Hobbit into just one shorter one.
In separate classics news, Marianne was sent home over the Christmas holidays to read Pride and Prejudice before term restarts, and we helped her get started by reading it out loud on our trip up to North Wales. The dialogue is even more hilarious at that pace. Were that possible. Though Austen is too quick to expose her authorial viewpoint of characters’ motivations at times; she’d do better to let it come out through the story.