‘A Hero Mumsy’: Parenting, Power and Production Changes in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Byard, Victoria ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8107-4674 (2014) ‘A Hero Mumsy’: Parenting, Power and Production Changes in The Sarah Jane Adventures. In: British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 118-130. ISBN 978-1-137-32757-4

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Abstract / Summary

Following the successful re-launch of Doctor Who in 2005, the BBC announced that a second spin-off series, The Sarah Jane Adventures, would be created for children’s television. Beginning in 2007 as a holiday special, The Sarah Jane Adventures was textually and generically anchored within the wider Doctor Who mythos; however, as an explicitly identified piece of children’s programming, its structure and priorities were not necessarily the same as those of its parent text. This chapter will suggest that the key mechanism for the adaptation of Doctor Who to The Sarah Jane Adventures was the parental role assumed by Sarah Jane Smith, formerly a companion to the Third and Fourth Doctors. This narrative and structural shift re-articulated Doctor Who not just as part of children’s television and the Children’s BBC brand, in particular, but what Henry Jenkins calls transmedia storytelling. Sarah Jane’s shift from isolated ‘madwoman’ to motherhood generated the ‘process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and co-ordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story’ (Jenkins, 2011). In the case of The Sarah Jane Adventures, children’s television made its own unique contribution to the unfolding text by re-articulating the spaces and anxieties of Doctor Who through the figure of Sarah Jane as mother and through the local and global relationships and responsibilities that result.

Item Type:	Book Section
ISBN:	978-1-137-32757-4
Subjects:	Film & TV > TV > British TV Education Film & TV Communication > Media
Courses by Department:	The School of Film & Television > Television
Depositing User:	Victoria Byard
Date Deposited:	05 Nov 2019 11:37
Last Modified:	11 Nov 2022 16:25
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/3310

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