Our survey of the Doctor Who girls now reaches Sarah Jane Smith and her creator, Elisabeth Sladen, who died in 2011. What I have to say about her will have a more personal angle than usual. I adored her, still do, always will. So I can’t pretend that anything that follows will have even a shred of objectivity; and if it seems self-indulgent, I can only ask you to share in that indulgence, or at least tolerate it as an eccentricity.
Sarah Jane entered the Doctor’s life in 1973 at the start of Jon Pertwee’s final series, and stayed until well into Tom Baker’s third in 1976. The intention was to bring the female sidekick into line with the social development that was then called ‘Women’s Lib’, by making her a more independent character with her own life and career as a journalist. This enabled her to carry her own strands of the plot rather than simply need to be rescued, whilst also having the kind of intelligent inquiring mind that facilitated the necessary exposition and explanation. In practice, it meant she made some pretty major blunders early on: mistaking the Doctor for the baddie in her first story, and then, in her second, waking up a dormant T Rex with camera flashes. Lis herself put it neatly in a line I’ve quoted several times before, but which remains one of the best summations:
‘She thinks she can stand on her own feet and she’ll always have a bash at things believing she’s right. But somebody normally ends up telling her she’s totally wrong – and it’s usually the Doctor.’
On her initial run alone, she was the most durable Doctor Who girl of them all: 3½ seasons, 80 episodes, around 33 hours of television, not to mention a spin-off LP adventure. And then she came back, first to front the pilot for a series that never happened, K9 and Company, then as one among many returning regulars in the ill-judged 1983 anniversary special, ‘The Five Doctors’, then for two new radio serials in the 1990s. And then Doctor Who came back properly, and Sarah Jane came with it…
So Lis wound up playing Sarah on and off for 38 years, more than half her life. Finally she got her own show, The Sarah Jane Adventures, which ran for five seasons, the last of them shown posthumously. All in all, quite an achievement!
Watching her gave many different kinds of pleasure, one of which was determined partly by the fact that she arrived at a point in the 1970s when women’s fashion had turned decisively towards pantsuits, and partly by the superior quality of what this particular woman had available to put inside the pantsuits.
Not everybody seems to have got this. There’s a scene in Tom Baker’s first story, ‘Robot’ (1974-75), in which Sarah has to climb over a wall.
When it was filmed, Lis was exhausted from making two stories back to back, and, doing the first take on auto-pilot, she went over the ‘wrong’ way around. Calling for a retake, the director told her he thought the viewers would rather see her face than her bottom! Me, I’m happy with either…
And it’s not just me, as is clear from this fan art mashup with The Avengers, with the Doctor as Steed and Sarah as Emma Peel:
Then there’s this caricature cover for a fake comic-book version of Jon Pertwee’s swansong:
So that’s at least two artists who are very well aware of the appeal of Sarah Jane’s rear aspect… and – guess what? – so was Lis herself!
She once told the audience at a fan convention,
‘There’s the most wonderful shot in the BBC archive of my bottom.’
She was talking about a sequence in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ (1974) where Sarah, dressed in jeans that were reportedly a size too small, is supposed to be escaping through a ventilation shaft – with the inconvenience that the hole in the wall didn’t go anywhere, meaning she had to stick her head in and wiggle her bottom about, as if trying to get through, until the director called ‘Cut!’
‘Somebody’s going to enjoy this tape,’ she thought at the time – and indeed, the complete footage was included in a video compilation for showing at the BBC engineers’ Christmas party!
Even if you’re not a connoisseur of the callipygean with a predisposition to look at a girl’s hinder parts, you don’t have to watch Sarah for very long before having your eyes drawn in that direction. Here’s one of her habitual mannerisms:
It doesn’t imply ‘just spanked’, much as we might like to imagine otherwise. As part of an acting performance, it’s a device to pull focus – so in effect, it could be taken as Lis inviting viewers to look at Sarah Jane’s situpon. That said, it was also something she often did herself when she wasn’t acting, one of the personal characteristics she put into creating the character and making her vividly human:
And what that means is that she understood perfectly well that she had an attractive feature behind her, and didn’t discourage attention to it. In fact, she sometimes dressed to make the most of it.
She was also aware of, and resigned to, the inevitable effects of time and aging. Once, on being invited to take a seat on a rather low chair, she remarked that this was alright, because nowadays she had a ‘low-slung bum’. And when the conversation on one DVD commentary turns to the perkiness of Sarah Jane’s youthful bottom, with Tom Baker rhapsodizing about ‘an apple bum’,
Lis comes back brightly with ‘Altered now.’
‘Even bottoms change,’ says Tom, wistfully.
As well as pantsuits, she was scripted to wear a bikini or swimsuit in one of her earlier episodes, ready for a trip to the beach. This got mysteriously changed to a halter top and shorts,
which made no sense when she then put on warmer clothing on top (the bikini, of course, would have doubled as underwear), and didn’t even give her any significant extra protection when a lurch of the TARDIS threw her to the floor on her bottom!
Now she’s got a good reason to rub it!
In the same vein, perhaps, there was also an unfulfilled expectation early on that she would continue in the tradition of her predecessors and sometimes wear a miniskirt. At her introduction to the press in 1973, she was asked to wear something that would show off her legs, though she opted for denim cutoffs rather than a skirt,
which was perhaps prudent in view of some of the poses…
Moreover, a scene was written into ‘Robot’ the following year in which she is told off by an unsympathetic character for her skirt being too short, which was amended to a rebuke for wearing trousers. Lis felt that the part entailed enough physical activity, including climbing, for a mini to be ‘impractical’ in scenes like these:
By ‘impractical’ she meant, of course, panty-revealing.
It is worth reinforcing the point that she wasn’t excessively modest.
She hadn’t been averse to wearing miniskirts in the days when they were fashionable, as herself as well as in character.
She later posed for a series of leggy glamor photos,
and she also took pride in her ability to dance the Can Can, which involves much swishing up of skirts and, at one point, the presentation of a frilly bottom to the audience. (I regret I have no photo of her doing it!)
Several of her stories about her early days on Doctor Who concerned the sheepishness with which others reacted when she would strip off to her underwear in public to change, for example in a boutique when shopping for costumes, and later in a church on location, which got her into trouble when she was caught by the vicar behind the altar in her bra and panties!
And in her final regular story, ‘The Hand of Fear’ (1976), there’s a sequence in which she wears a hospital gown, which happened to be backless (though you don’t see that on screen). As she told it, the scene took longer to film than it should have done because the men in the studio were a lot less interested in setting up the shots than they were in looking at her bottom – understandably, given that, at the time, the only covering was her white panties.
The question of Sarah Jane’s preferred panty color has been the subject of a slightly absurd debate, with one position holding that she is such a prim and sensible lady that she only ever wears plain white panties.
And it has to be said that there is some empirical evidence in favor of that view, because of this view in ‘The Ark in Space’ (1975):
That shot gave rise to some unexpected embarrassment years later when, just a little bizarrely, Lis was asked to supply a pair of her panties for auction at a fan convention… and initially handed over a red pair, only to be told they had to be panties she had been seen wearing on screen. Being a good sport, she found them a white pair from her suitcase, and afterwards the lucky auction winner had the panties framed and hung on the wall!
The ‘white only’ brigade also pointed to Sarah’s outfit in ‘The Hand of Fear’, which was sufficiently see-through to reveal another pair of white panties – in fact, the very same pair as in that hospital sequence I mentioned earlier.
But the argument falls down when we take another look at her in those beach shorts, which became unexpectedly translucent in low light:
Careful scrutiny shows that here we have colored, apparently pastel, panties with lighter band edging at the top and legs – and that busts the ‘white only’ myth!
The truth about Sarah Jane’s panty preferences is, of course, that she wore whatever Lis herself was wearing at the time, which had to be white in ‘The Ark in Space’ because of the main costume she was going to have later in the story:
Once again, if you look closely, you can see the white of her panties underneath – which is why she couldn’t opt for more colorful undies on this occasion!
But Lis did, some of the time. She wore flower prints when they were popular in the early 1970s.
(The bra and panties are her own – unlike the hair, which is a wig.)
She also had a story about the first take of this scene,
when her trousers ripped open at the back and revealed brightly-colored panties to the camera. So we can be sure that there would be a bit of variety if Sarah Jane were ever to get a few proper seat-of-the-panties spankings! And thanks to one of the incidental pleasures (or hazards) of tight trousers, we can also be sure that Lis (and therefore Sarah) usually wore regular bikini panties:
But later in her life, she also sometimes wore thongs (to my regret, because it’s an underwear style I dislike), and even went commando on occasion.
On her return to Doctor Who in 2006, after a decade-long career break, she was a little surprised at some of the ways in which the industry had changed and become more prescriptive and regimented. For instance, she wasn’t expecting to have reference photographs taken from every conceivable angle; she singled out one of these for mention, and described it with just one word. (The word was ‘bum’.) And she was particularly taken aback to discover that the costume designers wanted to know what panties she was wearing, even though they weren’t going to appear on screen, and required her to wear the same color and cut on every filming day. To her embarrassment, she didn’t have enough identical pairs and had to go underwear shopping…
While Doctor Who was on its long hiatus, the Welsh-Australian author David Franklin published his comic novel Looking for Sarah Jane Smith (2001).
It’s about Marty, a youngish man who is in love with Sarah Jane and wants to find her real-life equivalent, his ideal woman. Not altogether like me, though, because he has a very different attitude to one of my other favorite subjects. At one point he’s telling a friend about an encounter with a Sarah Jane lookalike in South Africa who invited him to spank her:
‘I gave it a go, but I could hardly keep a straight face. Whatever interest I had in her just died there and then. Anyway, it’s pretty difficult to spank someone when you’re flat on your back. I’d slap her arse as good as I could and she’d love it, but it did bugger all for me.’
His friend replies, ‘You don’t reckon Sarah Jane would like a good spanking, then?’ No, Marty doesn’t.
And that’s where, for me, it all gets complicated.
It’s no great surprise that all that admiring attention to Sarah Jane’s derriere should have included an occasional bit of mayhem. I’ve heard tell that she got spanking fan mail from time to time, but that’s not something I’ve ever been able to verify, for reasons that will become obvious if they aren’t already. She does get a sore bottom in ‘The Sontaran Experiment’ (1975), after a teleporter deposits her upside-down in a gorse bush.
It looks as if the scriptwriters were expecting her to be wearing something a little less protective than those yellow oilskins, because she is directed to register a pain in her seat.
Asked whether she’s hurt, she replies, ‘Only in my dignity,’
and then ‘pulls a very spiky piece of gorse off her behind’. So, that’s dignity in the euphemistic sense of the word, then…
Lis was also the first choice to play Patty, the mentally handicapped young woman in the banned television version of Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle (1976), who is threatened with a smacked bottom at one point. The scene is unpleasantly sexual and abusive, and Lis turned the part down, though I don’t think the reason was that she didn’t want someone to say he was going to smack her ‘pretty little bum’.
Never mind talk and obliquity, what about action? Well, I did say it was getting tricky, and here we go…
At first Lis didn’t get on with Jon Pertwee, which was partly because he resented the fact that she had replaced Katy Manning, with whom he had been especially close. The relationship got so bad that she seriously thought she would be unable to carry on working with him, and it all came to a head with an incident of physical violence. She describes this in her autobiography, but I have also heard about it in a significantly different version. Of course it’s the autobiography account that we ought to accept, isn’t it?
Well, maybe. The problem is that the autobiography was ghost-written on the basis of some fairly brief conversations, and the final manuscript was only delivered to Lis shortly before her death; she never actually read it. And there are quite a few things in there that I know for certain are wrong – maybe sometimes because Lis herself remembered things imperfectly, but apparently also in some cases because the ghost-writer misunderstood what he was told and embellished brief remarks into fully developed incidents that just didn’t happen as described. So the book can’t after all be taken absolutely on trust where ‘alternative facts’ cast its version of events into doubt.
The features of the story that are consistent across both versions are, ironically enough, that she suggested one of Pertwee’s tall tales might not be true, and he responded by hitting her. The issue, obviously, is how (or, putting it another way, where) he hit her. The autobiography describes an open-handed slap across the face, and maybe that is indeed what happened. But Jon Pertwee, born in 1919, belonged to a generation that subscribed to the maxim that a gentleman must never slap a lady’s face, but might, if appropriate, do the very thing that he is said to have done in the other version of the story – that is, put her across his knee and spank her.
I must say that I have really mixed feelings about this. Obviously there’s a part of me that really likes the ‘spanking version’.
But on the other hand, she described it as the nadir of her relationship with Pertwee (which improved later), and I might feel better about that if it was a smack in the face instead – except that I wouldn’t wish anything so unpleasant to happen to her.
I guess a lot of it boils down to the question of what she felt about spanking, and that’s a question I would never have asked her. As I’ve said before, if you were to ask your favorite celebrity whether she liked being spanked, and you actually got an honest response rather than an evasive or umbrageous one, the likeliest answer would be ‘No’ and the next likeliest would be ‘Yes, but not by you’, and in any event the asking of the question would risk a fundamental change in the relationship.
It’s not anyone else’s business what bedroom games she and her husband might have played, but the part of me that’s insatiably curious about her makes a point of remembering that spanking is not the quietest form of sexual activity, and that during the mid-1970s (including the main Sarah Jane period) they lived in a middle-floor apartment with neighbors above and below to disturb. What I can say for sure is that she knew about the less conventional forms of sexuality, humorously telling her successor, Louise Jameson, that a liking for bondage was an asset in being a Doctor Who girl. And she knew about M/F spanking in particular, because she owned a number of books with pictures of adult women being spanked.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea about that, I’d better explain that she was a film buff, which is why she had on her shelves a copy of, for instance, The MGM Story, which happens to contain spanking photos from Father of the Bride and Kiss Me Kate. Those pictures weren’t the reason she owned the book, but she must have seen them, and many others from Hollywood’s spanking heyday.
She also liked a certain type of assertive man. Among her girlhood heroes was Errol Flynn, who was responsible for a few smacked bottoms and spanking threats in his time. And as an ardent, lifelong Elvis fan she surely saw Blue Hawaii when it came out: the UK release was shortly after her 16th birthday, just the right time for it to have an impact on an adolescent libido.
Moreover, as an adult, she looked up to male figures of authority whom she trusted, and who were actively interested in her work, whereas she disliked being directed by women and didn’t appreciate insecure or inattentive men. In short, she was comfortable with alpha males, so long as their relationship with her was grounded in respect.
I’m really not trying to delve deeper than is warranted into the private dimension of her sexuality. This isn’t about what she personally liked doing or having done to her, but what she knew about the quirks of humanity in general and could therefore bring to bear on her creative work as a performer. What I’m trying to establish in particular is that she had a clear understanding of the M/F dynamic that is fundamental to both Doctor Who and the traditional mainstream spanking scenario, because that gets us close to the essence of Sarah Jane Smith, the character she created, and in particular what it is that makes Sarah so adorably spankable.
Lis got the job on the rebound after Jon Pertwee refused to accept the original actress who was cast:
The producer, Barry Letts, wanted a character who could be both strong and vulnerable. The tall, buxom April Walker fitted the first half of that contrasting pair of characteristics, which was fine for the ‘Women’s Lib’ angle but risked overbalancing the centrality of the Doctor himself. Pertwee wanted his second lead to be a physically slighter woman who would appear less of a challenge to his dominance. Lis had the advantage of fewer inches and a less imposing bust, but what clinched the role for her was the emotional qualities she presented at audition. Every other actress they saw portrayed a Sarah who was either brave or frightened. Lis made the character both at the same time – which not only satisfied all concerned, but was also pretty much bang on the money for a girl in a spanking scenario, especially with the extra quality of cheekiness that Lis brought to the part.
Asking for something there, dear, aren’t you? And I do still have the visual resources left in my files to see that you get it, good and proper…
But that doesn’t get us any nearer to ascertaining whether Jon Pertwee spanked her or slapped her face. We’ll never know for sure, and perhaps it matters just a little less in view of something that happened a year later, during the making of ‘The Ark in Space’. This was another of those stories in which Sarah has to crawl through a ventilation shaft, on this occasion getting stuck until the Doctor’s pretended mockery riles her into making the necessary effort.
But Lis herself got stuck for real, which held up the filming. So another member of the cast intervened to help her get free, only using different methods. He went round to the back of the set, where he would have seen something like this:
And, to use her own word (which I find really quite extraordinarily exciting), he spanked her till she wriggled herself through!
The series continues here.
Vanilla Spanking 