049 – The Space Pirates

Steven Businovski is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

This is the one; the one that most people don’t really like.

In strict chronological terms – at the time of writing, at least – The Space Pirates is the last Doctor Who serial ever to suffer from having some or all of its episodes missing, lost in time.  It’s actually a rarity in Season 6, in fact, with only two of eight episodes of The Invasion plus five from this serial taking away from an otherwise intact final year of Patrick Troughton’s tenure.

Of the six episodes of The Space Pirates, all bar Part Two are lost.  This relatively minor tragedy may or may not have been avoidable.  Indeed, much of the recent understanding seems to suggest that the BBC simply didn’t archive transmitted material in the way that they do now (and not because they smartened up their business of general housekeeping, but because the potential for massive financial gain to be had from the advent of home video made them rethink their widespread programme of purging and burning), and so it’s a moot exercise to wish that they had (even though we may all make that wish when we look at that long list of things we may never, ever see again).

But here’s the plus side to the junking of large swathes of the show’s early history:  There will always be episodes of Doctor Who yet to watch; there is always something else to be seen; there’s an adventure waiting for us to discover and see for yourself.  Think of that next time you’re bored watching The Web Planet for the third time, for there are hidden corners of the mythos that still sing out to us with the golden promises of El Dorado, and they may turn up anywhere, at any time – or not…  All of which rather skirts around the issue:  Is The Space Pirates actually any good?  Well, let’s try to look at the positives, shall we?

The one episode that we do have is in remarkably clean condition.  1969 seems to me as long ago now as the astronauts of Apollo 11 landing on the moon did to a younger version of me who watched the scratchy footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounce around the lunar surface, fluffing their own lines in a ‘one take only’ scene, and yet this recovered tape is as good as anything broadcast in much more recent times.  I’m not so sure that the restoration team get the credit that they deserve in converting the contents of film canisters on sale for 10p at village fair jumble stalls (in church halls after being found sitting in the vicar’s loft after thirty years’ benign neglect) into the high quality sound and vision we get in examples such as this, but I sure hope they do.

Deserving particular praise on this evidence is director Michael Hart for his handling of the beautiful Gerry Anderson-inspired model spaceship sequences peppered throughout this one episode, and one would assume, throughout the rest of the story.  The accompanying (space) operatic theme by good old Dudley Simpson complements these clips well, and the overriding impression is of the grandeur and desolation of space at a time when all the watching world probably still thought it would be quite a wheeze to be flung into the airless dark above.

There’s also a good bit of model work around the very Doctor Who science-y bit about Beacon Alpha Four being assembled from eight separate modules held together by the force of electromagnetism before being blown apart by the space pirates at the end of the first episode.  In one of these, we find the TARDIS triumvirate discussing the possibility of reintegrating the whole structure, one by one, by essentially re-magnetising them all back together.

The terrible difficulties experienced by the production team of the time meant that this was a story that never should have happened – but did.

In a perfectly Patrick moment, the Doctor hands Jamie a pair of magnets and a bit of string with which to understand through play the theory behind their chat, while he answers Zoe’s question of how he hopes to achieve this reunification by saying with triumph and hope in equal measure that he has a screwdriver and a little understanding about electromagnetics.  The improvising amateur is central to the character of the Doctor, as inherited from an older archetype that inhabits British science fiction and fantasy literature, and it shines again here through Troughton, albeit much too briefly.

Something else to watch out for is Gordon Gostelow’s costume as Milo Clancy, clearly modelled on the grizzled western gold prospectors of the western genre.  Modelled, that is to say, from the waist up, complete with Wild Bill Hickok moustache, but who, with his trousers and boots, seems to have heralded the coming of the New Romantics by some ten years.  In fact, I’m certain I’ve seen John Taylor in the same-styled pants on the cover of one of the singles from the first Duran Duran album.

It’s a rather lovely little touch in combining a pastiche of the known as well as a hint of the yet to come on the part of the designer, Ian Watson, who must also have been responsible for the model spaceships, so kudos to him on all counts (well, most counts), not least for the flashing lights and retro ‘60s futuristic industrial chic of the sets, which are nonetheless rumoured to be already-fabricated left-overs on a story that never was.

Viewers raised on Cosgrove Hall animations will also instantly recognise the voice if not face of Jack May, he of the low sonorous boom who here plays General Hermack but may be more familiar to some of us aw Count Duckula‘s Igor, the curmudgeonly old vulture butler.  Watching this episode, I found myself willing the pace on just so that we could have even the possibility of Igor sneakily offering Troughton’s Duckula a goblet of vintage blood while making snide asides about the size of Hines’ Nanny; alas knowing that neither the padded nature of this story or the fact that 1969 Doctor Who never did a crossover with Count Duckula from the late ‘80s denies me from ever seeing it happen.

And, well, that’s all I’ve got.  I’m sorry; there are no more positives that I can try and extract from this single 25 minutes of Second Doctor adventuring.  And it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, either.  The terrible difficulties experienced by the production team of the time meant that this was a story that never should have happened but did – very quickly – and it shows.  (Even if it nonetheless remains preferable to the originally-intended “Prison In Space”. Honestly, Google it.  Just wow…)

The Space Pirates isn’t perfect, but remains preferable to the originally-intended ‘Prison In Space’…

Aside from the title harkening back to B grade sci-fi films from the ‘50s complete with terrible American accents that cannot help but bring this down in the modern viewers’ debatably-more-discerning eyes, this is an adventure where Not Much happens – and a lot of it, too.  The Doctor’s first line comes a full eight minutes into the episode, rising from unconsciousness as he attempts to awaken his two young friends, who perhaps have fallen asleep from the whole situation.  It is a brief scene of just some few seconds, before we return to them for a second time after almost another five minutes of screen time elapse.

In their absence, we have lots of explanation from the crew of ‘the good guys’, who use lots of meaningless code words like V-41 and XX1 to further disengage the viewer, and who are dressed in the lowest-common-denominator conception of what people in the past thought people in the future would wear, not out of utility or comfort but due to how shiny and decorative it is.  They look like baroque versions of the Thunderbirds, and the existing scene involving the outrageously helmeted Madeleine Issigri, played by Lisa Daniely, and General Hermack, now played by Basil Exposition, on the wonderfully unimaginatively-named planet Ta, is unbeatable as well as unbearable in just how much information it dumps on the by-now entirely uninterested viewer.  Not even the pantomime nature of Issigri, telegraphing to anyone still conscious that she has Secret, Illegal Plans can help us to re-engage with proceedings.

But the lowest of all these lowlights?   Surely this occurs when we watch a man attempt to eat a hard-boiled egg for breakfast while suffering such mild inconveniences as burnt toast and an interruption due to a ringing phone, which is every bit as interesting as it dreadfully sounds.

I had never seen anything of The Space Pirates before writing this, and I desperately wanted to like it, even if it was in a way whereby I was able to simply sympathise with it as a cheap and mostly ho-hum episode of Doctor Who that nonetheless gave us an insight into what things were like on a Saturday tea time, long ago in an English spring.

Written by Robert Holmes, and with a recent history of positive revisions of opinions on lost stories that have been found and returned, I genuinely wanted to believe that there was enough here for me to mount an argument against those who would consistently place it in the bottom ten of every important Doctor Who series poll.  A few moments aside that are here previously outlined, I can’t say that I have walked away feeling like I have been enriched that little bit more by my exposure to what little remains to me of the valuable unviewed portion of a sprawling and largely-rich televised canon.

Perhaps the Doctor himself best sums matters up when he declares: “Oh dear, what a silly idiot I am!”, and the worst bit is that you can visibly see Troughton’s resignation at and disillusionment with a part in which he has positively glowed on most other occasions.

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