Transmat:SJA

The Sarah Jane Adventures

The Sarah Jane Adventures — often abbreviated as simply SJA — was a spin-off series of Doctor Who, produced by BBC Wales for CBBC. It ran from 2007 to 2011, over the course of five series. All stories except for the the initial one were presented in a serial format, with each serial being comprised of two, 25-minute episodes. Created by Russell T Davies after a positive experience working with Elisabeth Sladen on the Doctor Who episode School Reunion, it concerned itself with Sarah Jane's life after her initial encounter with the Tenth Doctor. The series featured regular appearances by several teenaged cast members, their parents, a computer named Mr Smith, and K9. Aimed at a younger audience than Doctor Who, its UK timeslot was typically around 16:30 on Mondays and Tuesdays.

The show followed Sarah Jane Smith some time after she met the Tenth Doctor in School Reunion. Like UNIT and Torchwood, Sarah Jane had decided to deal with aliens in her own way. She was assisted by teenagers from her neighbourhood who unknowingly involve themselves in her life, such as Maria Jackson, Clyde Langer, and Rani Chandra. Also, through her adventures, Sarah Jane entered motherhood by adopting former alien-created tools, such as her son Luke Smith and daughter Sky Smith. She was assisted in knowledge of alien life and technology by her super-computer, Mr Smith and robot dog K9 Mark IV.

Finding your way around our Sarah Jane Adventures content is super easy. All you have to remember are three little letters: SJA.

SJA was popular enough on the CBBC to spawn its own spin-off called Sarah Jane's Alien Files. Okay, it was mostly a clip show, but there was some original content as well.

SJA is the only part of the BBC Wales Who empire to produce novelisations. An old tradition of the 1963 version of Doctor Who, the tradition was revived for SJA for many of the same reasons Target novelisations had been popular in the 1970s and 1980s: they helped kids learn to read long-form fiction.

What might have been…

The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith was due to feature Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, but his ill health prevented him from appearing. The Brig nevertheless does feature in the novelisation, offering a tantalising glimpse of what would have been the character's only televised meeting with a 21st century incarnation of the Doctor.

Did you know that original SJA audiobooks were released every year the programme was on the air? Though most were released in print, the series ended as ebooks.

Since SjA shared much the same crew as Doctor Who, it makes since that our category:SJA crew structure would be pretty similar to that of the parent programme. Wanna find SJA 2D artists? We can do that! And SJA location managers and SJA make-up department and SJA foley editors and … oh, you get the picture.