Never Fear, Sarah Jane is Here!

If you're feeling a little down in the dumps about the ever nearing end of The Sarah Jane Adventures, then perhaps I can put a smile on your face.

Due to be released November 24th, two new SJA audio books go on sale! Judgement Day is written by Scott Gray and read by Anjli Mohindra and Children of Steel is written by Martin Day and read by Daniel Anthony.

With the current lack of any official blurb at the moment, I managed to catch up with Martin Day, who gave me a little information about Children of Steel. It sounds like a cracking story!

"Clyde can’t believe he’s let himself be dragged along to a boring old auction of antiques, but one particular lot has caught Sarah Jane’s attention. It’s listed as an anatomical sculpture of a human face, in brass, but to Sarah’s eyes it looks more like the head of a robot – from a time before the word ‘robot’ was even coined. Sarah Jane is convinced it’s part of the famed ‘Difference Golem’, a steam-powered ‘autonomous man’ from the Victorian era... "

Now, the die hard fans among us will have heard about these books at the end of last year. It was assumed at that point that Elisabeth Sladen would be reading them, as she had done with the previous SJA audios, but due to her sad passing earlier this year and no word on what would happen with the stories, we feared the worse.

"The intention had always been for Lis to read it [Children of Steel]" said Martin. "Indeed, I was at Chessington with the family, mulling over various possible titles [it was originally named The Difference Golem] (in this case, the last step before a formal commission) when I heard she had died.

"I wasn’t sure for a while if the book would go ahead, but that didn’t matter in the slightest – it was such terrible and sad news. Anyway, after a while, and much thought by AudioGO and the production team, I was told to write it in the third person, and just get on with it...!

"I only knew it was Daniel [Anthony] doing the reading when I spoke to him at the BFI screening a few weeks back. It was great to meet him afterwards – he said if I didn’t like his reading, I should let him know. As if!"

I will be talking to Martin a little bit more about his story in a few weeks time, so stay tuned! I hope this will make up for my lack of posts in the past few weeks and I should be keeping things up to date from now on.