‘I’m Not Past My Sell By Date Yet!’: Sarah Jane’s Adventures in Postfeminist Rejuvenation and the Later-Life Celebrity of Elisabeth Sladen

Abstract

At apparent odds both with what has been highlighted as ‘the cultural invisibility of the aged’ (Wearing, 2007: 279) and with Matt Hills’ observation that ‘age and aging don’t seem to play well’ in the BBC’s rebooted iteration of iconic science fiction series Doctor Who (Hills in Jenkins, 2009), British television actor Elisabeth Sladen became one of the biggest stars of UK children’s television in her 60s. Reprising the iconic role of the Doctor’s investigative journalist companion Sarah Jane Smith that she first played in 1973, and in which she was once regularly seen by audiences numbering in excess of 11 million (Chapman, 2006: 99), Sladen experienced a quite remarkable career renaissance and resurgence of her celebrity during her seventh decade. This was such that at the time of her death in 2011, she had the distinction to be playing the longest running (albeit not continuously) character performed by the same actor on British television outside of soap opera (Mulkern, 2011: 143). Frequently during its initial broadcast run from 2007 until 2011, when the fifth and final series was unavoidably curtailed due to Sladen’s untimely and unexpected death from cancer, the Doctor Who spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures (hereafter, SJA), in which she starred in the title role as an alien-fighting journalist assisted by a small group of local teens, was the highest rated show on its host channel, CBBC.¹ This was routinely the case for the episodes that comprised the first two series in 2007 and 2008, when each one topped the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board’s lists of the highest rated shows for that channel in its respective week of broadcast (BARB, 2015). Furthermore, after an apparent dip in its CBBC primacy during the third series,² it continued to be the case for the entire run of the fourth series, and the partially completed (and posthumously broadcast) fifth series.