Catmachine

"There's nothing only about being a girl" Like most bad news these days I first became aware of it in the Twitter stream. There in between the hashtags, drunken utterings and missives from the afternoon in California was the sad and unbelievable news that Elisabeth Sladen was dead. I couldn't quite parse it. It didn't fit. She couldn't be dead, she was Sarah-Jane . There's talk of her being remembered fondly by Doctor Who fans of "a certain age" which I assume includes me. But for me it wasn't quite like that. I was, I suppose, a late developer so didn't develop any sort of crush on her. But this didn't matter, for me she became the definitive companion - Jamie, Zoe and Jo were all part of my young childhood imagination but Sarah-Jane was the first of the Doctor's friends I could identify with or imagine being my friend. An older sister or an aunt perhaps. At first she seemed to be written too self-consciously as a voci...