Last night's TV: Sarah Jane Adventures

Last night's TV

Jeremy Clay

Whatever deal Elisabeth Sladen hammered out, I hope it was all worth it.

I don’t mean the contract she got from the BBC for a new series of the Sarah Jane Adventures (4.35pm, BBC1), but the pact she made with the devil. The one where she signed away her soul.

How else to explain the fact that a woman who first appeared as Doctor Who’s assistant in 1973 looks more or less exactly the same in 2008?

I was six when Sladen made her Tardis debut as investigative journalist Sarah Jane Smith.

In the intervening 35 years, my voice has dropped, my face has sagged, I’ve grown taller but alas wider and I’ve lost hair on my head while contrarily gaining it on my back.

And yet there she is, 60 years old, looking much as she did when she was dashing round the universe with John Pertwee and Tom Baker.

It’s uncanny. Unnatural, even. In medieval times, we’d all have gathered round the village pond to watch her get a good ducking.

It’s not just Sladen who hasn’t changed a bit in the last four decades. Her character is straight out of the past too.

Doctor Who may have had a modern-day makeover, but the spin-off Sarah Jane Adventures seem to be working to a clumpy script penned in the mid 1970s.

There are none of those playful, inventive little flourishes which gave the kiss of life to the Russell T Davies era Time Lord.

Instead it’s just a routine romp through junior sci-fi; the kind of show where goodies get chased by baddies but stop mid-peril to discuss the plot. The kind of show, in fact, you’d think kids are too sharp for these days.

But it’s clearly not aimed at me, nor anyone else of back-hair age. Maybe if you’ve just got back from school, and you’re sitting in front of the box with a big plate of Party Rings, it’s just the thing. And at least it’s not Hannah Goddama Montana.

Sarah Jane’s a rubbish journalist, by the way. In the first of this two-parter, she found a spaceship in the woods and got taken hostage by an alien. But she didn’t take any notes.

* Who Do You Think You Are: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (9pm, BBC1) ...

.... Hang on, that’ll do as the review.