N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

It’s hard to put in words just how astonishing the K-9 and Company opening credits are. When people say ‘Well, it was the 80’s …’, this is the kind of thing they mean. Naff the opening credits may be, but you gotta love ’em!

“Oh Doctor, you didn’t forget.”

Sarah, K-9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend

It’s nice that we finally to get meet the Aunt Lavinia who Sarah pretended to be way back in The Time Warrior. Indeed, Lavinia’s ward Brendan is, aside from aforementioned title sequence and the return of Sarah-Jane herself, the best thing about this episode.

For all John Leeson’s voice acting heroics, K-9 doesn’t really have much to do. You have to say that it was a much better proposition to focus a spin-off on Sarah Jane herself. It’s a bit of shame that it took another 25 years for them to do so.

As we never saw beyond this pilot episode, I can only imagine that Morton Harewood was a lonely place once all the members of the Satanic cult have been rounded up.

Finally, and somewhat curiously, in the Doctor Who universe, Chipping Norton still had a railway station in 1981 (a fact not lost to Doctor Who Magazine in its 2018 Christmas issue, which coincidentally covered K-9 and Company in The Fact of Fiction column this month).