K-9 is too clearly full of features to have been built as a one-off. No way they'd spend that kinda money just to use him once.
Yes, it's cutesy, but, as a child I *adored* K-9. It's a children's show, at the end of the day.
Though we're going through a period here 15 series in where they can't decide if it's 14 year olds or 8 year olds they mean, I think.
Which is fair. The younger siblings of kids who started watching the show from the beginning are 15, in 1977. The show's... well, did Z-Cars have to worry about their audience growing up in quite the same way as Doctor Who does? Z-Cars was nearly over in 77, but I don't think either show knows their futures with certainty at this point. (I have never seen Z-Cars, but I know it's one of those shows that ran forever and nearly every beloved performer of a generation from the UK currently living has been on it.)
But Doctor Who has to be a family show, and having a family show means having some opinions about what a family looks like.
