RTD On The Return Of Jo Grant

Speaking to SFX magazine, Russell T Davies has spoken about bringing back Jo Grant to the latest series of The Sarah Jane Advetures, and the process he went through in order to best write her character while also being faithful to the classic show.

“For the first time ever, I went and watched old stuff. We used to bring back monsters and I didn’t actually go and watch the old tapes, partly because I think the way you remember them is just as powerful as what they actually were. But I did go back and watch the end of ‘The Green Death’ [Jo Grant’s final story]. And I think it’s really important to preserve the absolute beauty of what [producer] Barry Letts and [script editor] Terrance Dicks did there.”

“We talked about it a lot beforehand. I know there’s a feeling that she’d have got divorced, and there was a theory that she’d be living on her own in Wales in a little cottage – some of the novels did this – and you think, ‘Nice idea, but actually that’s absolutely betraying the way we left her’. We left her with the promise of happiness, of adventure, of love and joy, and you can’t be cynical and undercut that by saying, ‘Oh, she’s a drug addict now! Her husband left her, she’s lonely, her life is bitter’. That’s just interfering with classic Doctor Who and rewriting what we were promised. So I was absolutely strict about that.”

The full article can be read HERE