Extraordinary Boys

After three really dramatic and intense Sarah Jane Adventures in a row, the first part of Mona Lisa's Revenge returned us firmly into "amusing romp" territory; and nothing wrong with that. I'll review the story as a whole after I've watched the second part, but here's something that struck me about Part One:

Since the reboot in 2005, the Doctor Who franchise has spent a lot of time in praise of the ordinary. Rose was a shopgirl from a council estate, Donna was a temp; of course in the middle we had Martha, an educated and capable doctor-in-training... who might as well have been chopped liver as far as our chops-and-gravy-eulogizing Time Lord hero was concerned. Torchwood centers around the anything-but-ordinary Captain Jack, but the real audience identification figure is Gwen, constantly torn between secret agent life and her blissful, boring relationship with tubby and hapless Rhys. When we met Ianto's sister and her family in Children of Earth the jig was up: tubby, hapless, tabloid-reading "ordinary folk" without a GCSE between them are the salt of Russell T Davies' earth, the new most important people in the Whoniverse.

Sarah Jane isn't as bizarre a protagonist as the Doctor or Jack, but they do play up the idea that she's a pretty odd old lady: she's traveled in time and space, she has a robot dog and an alien supercomputer in the attic... meanwhile her son Luke is an incredible genius grown in a vat by the Bane, and new girl Rani is a precocious wannabe investigative journalist whose dad is the school headmaster, neither of them exactly commonplace. With the departure of Maria Jackson, Clyde Langer was left as the series Everyman (or Everykid): a lot less concerned with academic success than being "cool", which is pretty much kidspeak for safe and ordinary.

So, I know it's only in the episode to provide a spurious justification for the gang to be roaming around an art gallery, but it was weird to see Clyde outed as one of Britain's most promising young artistic talents. (Not quite sure what it could have been about his busty-space-babes-brandishing-guns piece that won such admiration from the serious art community, but we'll let that slide.) What this seems to imply, at least to me, is that while the "grown-up" shows are intent on hammering home to us the idea that Mr and Mrs Joe Slob eating their fish and chips in front of the telly in Cardiff are the most wonderful and enviable creatures in the universe... Sarah Jane Adventures has left behind the last pretense that its young team are anything other than three incredible child prodigies.

None of this should come as any surprise in a world where children's fiction is still in thrall to Harry Potter, with its sharp dividing line between magical folk and the crude, boring Muggles. I have to say I feel that Russell T Davies ladled on the opposite view a bit thick over the past 5 years - to the point where it almost felt like his shows had contempt for anyone who tried to be educated or exceptional, or just stand out from the crowd. On the other hand, my favorite character from Buffy ended up being Xander, just because in a show where every other character was turning out to be an immensely powerful witch or werewolf or demon or angel, he remained an ordinary schmoe to the bitter end.

I guess my ideal is for there to be a balance: no contempt for ordinary working-class folk, but equally, no suspicion of those who have education and talents, and use them to live extraordinary, heroic lives. Clyde, Rani, Luke and Sarah Jane all fall into the latter category, I think, and it's nice. Because three shows dedicated to continually showing the nobility of life on the sink estate would probably be too many.