Vintage Item no.6 - K9

K9 was written into Doctor Who round about the time Star Wars took off and, at first it seemed like he was just an excuse for a merchandising rip-off. But there was more to him than that. I’ve always loved this querulous know-it-all, trundling along at top speed on his castors. How can something so essentially expressionless manage to play such a range of emotions? Everything from a profound fit of pique to the depths of despair. How can that red visor thing make it seem as if he’s rolling his eyes in disdain?

I was horrified when they wrote him out of Doctor Who, so casually, so carelessly, just before Tom Baker left the show. Hope leapt up briefly with the Christmas pilot episode of ‘K9 and Company’ in 1981. Seemingly everyone hates this show but me. I watch it every Christmas Eve (along with a set of other Christmas TV specials – of which, perhaps, more later.) I love the idea of Sarah and K9 being pushed together by the Doctor’s invisible hands and winding up battling Satanists deep in the English countryside. Oh, that fantastic theme tune (sung by K9 himself!) and those shots of him and Sarah jogging energetically, perching on dry stone walls, and typing articles for magazines outside pubs. And oh…! that spooky transsexual red herring at the sherry party!

But, as we know, it never took off. There was an annual, a year later, which I treasured. And Sarah and K9 cameo’d in The Five Doctors in 1983, but K9 didn’t get to the Death Zone along with all the other characters because the ground was a bit too rough for him.

The last time I went to the wonderfully tatty and glorious Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool – it would have been 1984 – there was K9 himself, shoved on a conveyor belt, appearing behind glass partitions and coming out with his various catchphrases. Looking as hopeless as Chi-Chi the world-famous panda, stuck behind glass in the Kensington Natural History Museum café (and she gave me a shock, when I first saw her, too.) My heart bled for that robot dog.

Of course, everything comes back. At least it does in Doctor Who. At the moment I’m probably the only one amongst the people I know who was cockahoop over the advert on Youtube for the Bob Baker / Dave Martin K9 series recently filmed in Australia. Call me daft, I think it looks marvellous. Especially bit where K9’s apparently turned evil – wearing some kind of high priest robes covered with hieroglyphs and swooping around in the air. And The Sarah Jane Adventures is coming back for a third season too – with hopefully, more robot dog action. It looks likes they’re letting him out of that cupboard a bit more.

It makes that fourteen year old Paul, visiting Blackpool, staring at that battered K9 on the treadmill, very pleased to know that the disco dog is back in work.

It makes me wonder, though, about Christmas 2009. With curious goings-on in Sussex… unseasonal deadly hornets, stuffed animals rampaging about. Other strange, untoward stuff going on. Imagine if Sarah and K9 sloped off alone to investigate? And found, in a hidden-away cottage, the Doctor – her Doctor – just as she was, sitting there with Mike Yates and Mrs Wibbsey. My guess is that Mike probably phones Sarah at some point in Christmas Eve to get the Doctor to bellow hello down the phone at her, as a nice surprise.

Funny to think of all these characters from my childhood being about at the same, still having adventures this autumn and Christmas.

Of course, rereading E Nesbit recently for the course I’m teaching, I’m realising that K9 is more like one of her magical wish-granting creatures than he is R2-D2. He’s really the Psammead or the Phoenix – with his haughty tone, his capricious nature – his slight sulkiness but willingness to do anything for his masters. With his batteries winding down every now and then he reminds us of the way the Phoenix’s carpet would only grant three wishes in a single day. And the literalness of the wish-granting in Edith Nesbit’s books is a precursor to the straightforward thinking of a small, puzzled robot dog.

Once again, it seems – I’m finding fairy tale motifs in Doctor Who where, on the surface, it’s supposed to look like science fiction.

Above – a drawing from my 1982 page-a-day diary, and one of the illustrations from that fabulous but unique 1983 K9 annual.