I’ve been a peripheral Doctor Who fan – if there’s an episode on or if the TV station is running the entire run of a certain multipart episode, I’ll sit and watch it. I haven’t really gotten into the current iterations of the Doctor, I’m of the generation that appreciated Tom Baker and Peter Davison.
To be a fan of Doctor Who, you also had to appreciate his traveling companion. They were young men and women who traveled through time and space in Doctor Who’s police phone booth / TARDIS spaceship. They were you and me, experiencing entire galaxies and planets where the British Empire had extended beyond the skies and the heavens. Of course the British Empire had colonized the universe; why else did everybody speak with a British accent on planets millions of miles away from Earth?
But I digress.
One of my favorite traveling companions was Sarah Jane Smith, a character played by actress Elisabeth Sladen. The episodes she starred in – from 1973 to 1976, working with Doctors Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker – made her character one of the most popular on the series. She was the first companion I ever saw, and that was when WMHT started airing episodes of Doctor Who as part of their late afternoon / early evening lineup. When I attended Hamilton College, I could watch Doctor Who episodes on the local cable system, as Harron Cable (the college’s cable TV provider) carried New York independent station WOR-9. So every Saturday morning, I could get two 30-minute episodes of Doctor Who, and I could follow the adventures of the Doctor and Sarah Jane each week. In fact, I would argue that Sarah Jane and the Brigadier were the two most popular non-Gallifrey residents on that show.
A few years ago, I saw that Elisabeth Sladen made an appearance on the rebooted Doctor Who, and the response was so overwhelmingly positive that her character was given her own television series, The Sarah Jane Adventures. The show, along with the other Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood, aired on my cable system, and I would set the DVR to watch the classic companion in new adventures with companions of her own.
Today, I learned that Elisabeth Sladen passed away, after a long bout with cancer. She was 63, and she was still appearing in episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures up to the last. She joins Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier in many episodes of Doctor Who; Courtney succumbed to cancer last February.
This is a sad day for fans of the TV series. Elisabeth Sladen will be missed. Much thoughts and prayers to her family on this passing.
Chuck The Writer 
She was the first companion for me and my wife as well. Both of us well remember her with Pertwee and Baker as they travelled together. Now my five year old daughter watches both the new incarnations of the Doctor as well as the classics on DVD. I know we will be having a Sarah Jane marathon this weekend.
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While I’m not among the “Doctor Who” faithful, I have several friends who most definitely are — and I can understand how hard Ms. Sladen’s passing has hit them. It parallels the feelings I had upon learning of the deaths of the actors who portrayed Miss Moneypenny, “Q” and the original “M” in the James Bond films. When you’ve been that dedicated to a series, this really does strike you on a very personal level.
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