K9 in a safe, floating in space...

It's a weird thought, but that's exactly how everybody's favourite robotic dog cameos in last night's premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Like Torchwood, it's another spin off from Doctor Who - but this one's been over twenty years in the making. Originally planned for release in the early eighties as K9 & Company (they even made a pilot) the idea of a science fiction adventure featuring Sarah Jane Smith was taken up again after the nostalgic Doctor Who episode School Reunion.

Sarah Jane Smith, a young reporter who travelled with the 3rd and 4th incarnations of the Doctor, was undeniably the most popular of all his assistants. She was sassy, spunky and far more capable and curious than any of his companions until Billie Piper arrived as slightly chavvy Rose. Sarah Jane was years ahead of her time and absolutly lovely, despite her habit of wearing brightly coloured dungarees.

Sarah Jane Smith is played by Elisabeth Sladen, who has a ton of charm and charisma and is still lovely even thirty years after she left the Tardis. In the Sarah Jane Adventures, she's back as the investigative reporter, living in a big house in North London (it's got at least seven floors and an attic, judging by how many flights of stairs they had to run up to avoid the alien menace last night.) Much like a slightly more organised Torchwood, Sarah Jane collects fallen and abandoned alien gadgets and does her bit for Human/Alien relations.

In last night's episode, she and her young neighbour Maria meet up with a mysterious boy created by the evil alien Bane, to perfect their mind controlling fizzy soda Bubbleshock. This episode was written by Gareth Roberts and Russell T. Davies and seems to be loosely based on a Doctor Who novel called The Highest Science, featuring a similar plot.

Unlike adult orientated (and gay manifesto) Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures is aimed at a younger audience and is brighter and cheerier. Although lonely Sarah Jane seems a bit grumpy at first, she's a bright and engaging lead and I think this show will be much more enjoyable than Torchwood.

My criticisms from last night's episode involved a serious lack of K9 (who is apparently floating in space, repairing a black hole) and a bit of a deus ex machina ending (Sarah's piles of alien junk threaten to provide a solution to just about any alien menace, much like the Doctor's overused Sonic Screwdriver.)

But the magic Russel T. Davies brought to Doctor Who is lingering in this show and it's a lot less Welsh and depressing than Torchwood, so I have high hopes.

K9, sadly, will not be reappearing as he's apparently getting his own spin off TV show in early 2008. That makes three spin offs in three years.

The BBC sure know how to milk a franchise.

Torchwood

I've just caught the third episode of Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood.

In the new series of Doctor Who a character called Captain Jack Harkness was introduced. Handsome and dashing, Harkness was played by John Barrowman and distinguished himself by being incredibly vibrant, charasmatic and omnisexual.

To clarify, the character of Jack Harness would sleep with anything. Garden furniture if there was nothing else about.

This is because the reinventor of the Doctor Who franchise, Russell T. Davies, has an agenda to push, like on just about every BBC TV show. He is gay and Doctor Who has become a bit gay as a result. The first incarnation was a big, butch man with a shaved head and a leather jacket. Very, very gay.

Not that it's a bad thing. Russell T. Davies reinvented the franchise and created a new TV show that manages to be better, by several leaps and bounds, than the timeless original from which it's based. Doctor Who rocks now and part of that is it's gayness.

Take Jack, for example. Captain Jack is dashing and handsome and flirts with characters both female, male, vegetable and mineral. Why? Because Russell T. Davies wanted to establish that in the future, people aren't so obsessed with the labels we place on people today. Jack has relationships with people, not genders.

It would have come across as terribly preachy if it wasn't for John Barrowman, who happens to be a very cool, sexy actor who makes the character of Captain Jack totally lovable even to stuffy old Telegraph readers like myself.

He is the best thing to come out of Doctor Who since K9.

And, like K9, the BBC have decided to base a series around him.

Angel to Doctor Who's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Torchwood is darker and more adult (if you watch it, and are familiar with both Buffy and Angel, you will be amazed at how similar the two products are. Torchwood and Angel and Buffy and Doctor Who.)

It's all set in Cardiff. The rest of the cast are uniformly nondescript. The scriptwriter has taken all the juice and life of Captain Jack and murdered it.

But John Barrowman is amazing. And that, plus some great X-files type plots, lift this show up and make it worth watching. I just hope the franchise lasts from shaky first season to solid second (and further) series.

Torchwood is on BBC and repeated incessently. This is the BBC we're talking about, after all.