No.11.
Now into its fourth season, Doctor Who has given us a very mixed bag of companions. Susan was there right from the beginning - a member of the Doctor's own family. The character was poorly served by the writers, however, and the actor elected to leave after just one year.
Left behind in the TARDIS were teachers Ian and Barbara, who were the real audience identification figures. In the early days, the Doctor was an unknown quantity, sometimes an unpleasant one, and it was Ian who was the traditional hero figure. He was also there to help us understand the science, whilst Barbara helped with the history - a subject she tended to get overly involved with. Vicki and Steven provided a good pairing, but the production team of John Wiles and Donald Tosh really messed things up by pushing Maureen O'Brien out as early as they did. They replaced her with Katarina, who proved to be an outright failure. The excuse was that a companion from history wouldn't work as they would need everyday 20th Century things explained to them.
Dodo - an attempt to create a new Susan - proved to be another misfire. Wiles and Tosh left, to be replaced by Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. Lloyd wanted more mature companions, from contemporary London (which was internationally trendy at the time). The result was Ben and Polly.
Any chance of stability in the TARDIS was upset first by the arrival of a new incarnation of the Doctor, and then by the arrival of James Robert McCrimmon - Jamie.
It is obvious from his first appearance - The Highlanders - that he was never intended as a companion. He plays no significant role in the story. It seems Lloyd had grown bored with Ben and Polly (though there are unsubstantiated claims he was unhappy with demanding behaviour - which makes little sense if he also asked Wills to stay on with Hines as she claims).
According to very recent interviews, Frazer Hines continues to believe that Jamie's retention was down to positive public response, but this simply isn't true. As I've said, he makes no impact at all in his first story, and his entry into the TARDIS was already filmed before the public got to see him properly. Much more likely was that it was a case of 'jobs for the boys'. Lloyd and his boss Shaun Sutton knew Hines, as did Troughton, and so he benefited from favouritism.
The idea of a historical companion posing problems was simply ignored - as it would be when Victoria arrived, to accompany the Doctor concurrently with Jamie.
For several stories, lines have to be shared between Ben and Jamie, or Jamie simply gets concussed and left out of the story for a few episodes. Ben and Polly had to be written out as soon as possible, and get a poor deal in their final story when they go missing for four episodes, only featuring in a quick pre-filmed departure scene. So keen was Lloyd to get rid of them, hoping to secure Pauline Collins, that they were paid off early.
The circumstances of his arrival might have been questionable, but Jamie did go on to become one of the most popular and long running companions, appearing in all but one of the Troughton stories. He almost featured in The Three Doctors, managed a cameo in The Five Doctors, and made a proper return in The Two Doctors.
Jamie has also been the inspiration for a whole hugely popular non-Doctor Who fantasy series.
For me, the Second Doctor-Jamie pairing is second only to the Fourth Doctor-Sarah one.
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