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Jo Grant bumbles straight onto the screen in Terror of the Autons and spends the next three years running after the Doctor and growing up before finding her own younger Doctor to fall in love in and go up the Amazon.
What are your thoughts on Josephine Grant?
Si xx
What's nice about Jo is that she genuinely grows from a girl to a woman over the space of her years in Doctor Who; the bumbling, almost sexless young assistant in "Terror of the Autons" is such a far cry from the ditzy, confident, glamorous woman who falls in love with Cliff Jones in "The Green Death". Along the way she has dalliances with King Peladon and the Thal Latep, and that's all part of her growing up. "The Time Monster" is a key story for her as well, I think, as she stands on her own two feet and defies the Doctor by initiating Time Ram, saving his life in the process. And in "Frontier in Space" she neatly reminds us of how much she is grown by revealing she has developed a resistence to the Masters hypnotic powers.
She's perhaps a bit lost in time now; there would be companions with bigger "selling points", and Sarah-Jane steals her longevity crown. But who doesn't love Jo Grant?
Si.
I love Jo, and love watching her grow up over the course of the next few series. I also love these stories in which she appears, stories often criticised for seeming too "safe and homely" rather than the "gritty realism" of season 7.
I love Jo's fashion sense, far from being set in "the near future" as these stories supposedly are, I think her fashion sense is fairly rooted in this period (early seventies), as platform boots, hot pants, tank tops, and latterly a midi skirt are in vogue, and Jo wears them to perfection, the epitome of early seventies fashion.
unlike the vast majority of companions in both classic and new series you can't help but instantly fall in love with Jo Grant. the moment she tells The Doctor, "I'm your new assistant".. I can't really add much more to what Si, and Stephen, have already said other than IMO, the way she was prepared to sacrifice herself to save the Doctor, on more than one occasion makes her for me the most fiercely loyal of all the companions.
I always feels though that Pertwee's Doctor often seems the most snappy with Jo Grant compared to anyone else. Or maybe I've just seen the wrong stories.
It's true that with Jo's replacement Sarah-Jane, some of the irritability of the Doctor feels like it doesn't go unchecked.
Jo was always my favourite companion/assistant when I was growing up. Don't know why, considering most of her episodes were broadcast when I could barely focus let alone comprehend; so i came to love her through the books. It was the wonderful spy-wanna-be nature that I loved - she so wanted to Mrs Peel to the Doctor's Stead but was more Tara King if you ask me.
When I finally saw the Jo episodes - I was delighted to see that my mental image of her was spot on. Not sure that was down to the Target writers being accurate or whatnot, but all the same it was a real pleasure.
If only the third Doctor wasn't banned in our house...