49: The Space Pirates

Before Watching

Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to embark upon a momentous occasion. We have reached the last missing story. Yes, episodes 1, 3.4.5 and 6 are the last 5 recon episodes we will ever have to endure during the whole of this marathon watch. I will allow you a minute to make a silent prayer of thanks.

So, what do we already know about “The Space Pirates”? It’s another Robert Holmes story – fine – and like his slightly earlier “The Krotons” it was a late replacement for a story which didn’t work out. Either I’ve read this somewhere, or seen it in an extras DVD, but the team of Derrick Sherwin and Peter Bryant did have a reputation for taking stories quite a long way in development before deciding that they wouldn’t work for whatever reason. Terrance Dicks had been shadowing Script Editor Sherwin, and by this stage was sharing duties with him. So when a story was dropped at a late stage, they were forced to look around at whatever stories they had in reserve from earlier, and this is how Dicks came to bring “The Krotons” to Peter Bryant’s attention. I believe that it was a similar story with “The Space Pirates”.

It’s fair t say that this story’s reputation is none too sweet. At 195 it is the lowest placed Troughton story in the Mighty 200 – 1 position below The Underwater Menace. By the 2014 Poll it came in 235^th out of 241. However let us be fair. Unfamiliarity with the story can explain the lowly place to some extent, as can received wisdom, it being the sort of story where people who have never seen it will confidently tell you that it’s rubbish. As always, let’s find out for ourselves.

After Watching

Right, so far my yardstick of crap is Season 3’s opener, “Galaxy Four”. This is nowhere near as bad as that. This is an attempt at a straightforward space opera, one might almost say in the genre of a lot of Star Trek. In fact this is probably the first attempt to do a straight space story without aliens or monsters. The plot is fairly sound, and has its roots maybe in the western genre. See what you think: -

The eponymous pirates are after a substance called Argonite. They get it by docking with space beacons, which are made of the stuff, blowing them into component modules, taking them back to their base, melting them down and selling the aragonite. The Earth Space Corps try their best to catch these pesky varmints, but their large ship is too small to catch the fast ships used by the pirates, while their small ship, called Minnows, are fast enough but don’t seem to have the range.

The TARDIS materializes on board a beacon, which is shortly attacked by pirates. The travelers are in a module which is separated from a module containing the TARDIS, and only survive oxygen starvation when they are rescued by an old fashioned space miner called Milo Clancy – more about him after. The Space Corps have Clancy down as possibly the leader of the pirates. Clancy takes them to the nearest planet, Ta. Ta is owned and run by the Issigri Mining corporation, which was founded by Clancy’s old partner, Dom Issigri. They split up, and the Space Corps believe Clancy was implicated in Issigri’s death. It turns out that the pirates actually have their base on Ta, and Madeleine Issigri, Dom’s daughter, is in league with them. When she threatens to break with them, Caven, their leader, he reveals that her father is not dead, but in their captivity. After a lot of toing and froing the Doctor, Milo and the Space Crops foil Caven, who is shot down when a Minnow finally catches up with him, and Madeleine shows repentance and is taken away for trial.

Now ok, you might say that this does not exactly sound riveting, but then if you boil down the plots of a lot of stories to their bare essentials, then they don’t sound all that. The fact is, if you consider that this was written by the late, great Robert Holmes, then this does share certain plot elements with his ever popular “Caves of Androzani” – fights over valuable minerals – corruption in high places being two which spring immediately to mind. The Science Fiction concepts in it are fairly sound, and I never really found myself saying – why is so and so doing that – as can often happen.

Which is not to say that it’s great Doctor Who, because it isn’t. When there’s a monster/alien in the story then you’re interested at least for a while in learning what there is to learn about the monster. Without that, then I think there’s a greater burden on characterization, and if you don’t have any rounded, well fleshed out, or interesting characters, then your story is going to suffer. Milo Clancy, the roguish individual at odds with the conformity and regimentation around him,(a type Holmes was particularly fond of, judging by the number of times they appear in his stories) has his moments, but I find myself continually distracted by the accent Gordon Gostelow adopts throughout the story. If you’re of a similar vintage to me the name might not mean a lot to you, but you’d surely recognize him from a string of character parts on TV in the 60s, 70s and 80s. As I recall he’d often play parts which required a Northern accent (nothing wrong with that before anyone writes in). Now, paying homage to the story’s wild west antecedents, Gordon plays Milo Clancy with a wild west accent. Only . . . he can’t make it stick. His Northern vowels and inflections are consistently breaking through. It’s a little bit like watching a John Wayne film when the Iron Duke suddenly puts an ‘ecky thump, well I’ll go to t’foot of our stairs’ in the middle of a speech.

I rather liked Lisa Daniely’s Madeleine Issigri as wwell. Although I originally felt that she was likely to be the mastermind (or is that mistressmind?) of the pirates, but she was well written and three dimensional enough that I did start to doubt myself until her relationship with the pirates was made explicit. Down among the wines and spirits, I’m not sure exactly whether we were meant to draw the conclusion that General Hermack, played by Jack May, is rather besotted with Madeleine Issigri, which blinds him to the obvious clues that she is at the very least sheltering the pirates – or whether he is just thick. Oh, and before I forget I have to make the observation that Major Ian Warne, played by Donald Gee, is a dead ringer for Jay from The Inbetweeners. The two pirates we actually get to know at all, Caven, the leader, and his second in command Dervish aren’t a typical Holmesian double act, but there is a nice contrast between the frankly evil Caven, and the somewhat more weasley Dervish. Just out of interest, in the Ryk Mayall sitcom “The New Statesman”, his character, Alan B’Stard shares an office in the Palace of Westminster with one Peers Fletcher-Dervish, played by Michael Troughton, Patrick’s son! George Layton gets an early screen credit playing Penn, who is a button pusher on the Earth Space Corps ship. He doesn’t get a great deal to do or say, but hey, his career was going to blossom in the Doctor sitcoms in the 70s.

A word for the model work in this story. The only live action episode we have to judge by is episode 2, but judging by this, and also by the photographs in the recons the work in this story was up to the standard being produced by the same time as Gerry Anderson, and that’s praise indeed. I quite like the look of the Minnow spaceships, but just wish that they didn’t have such a long pointed nose, with a droop at the end, which just looks a little silly. 

Well, I think we’ve been more than fair to the story so far. Now let’s go a little more negative. Most six parters we’ve seen so far are too long and suffer from padding. To my mind this definitely seems prolonged beyond its natural span, and I think that the problem is in the first 3 or 4 episodes. It just takes far too long to get going. You could boil down the best bits from episodes 1 – 3 into one good, lean and mean episode. Unusually for Robert Holmes, a lot of the dialogue could be pruned as well. AS I mentioned when I reviewed “The Krotons” I have read a very interesting biography of the great man, and by the time that he took over script editing duties, Holmes had formulated a very particular approach to a six parter, one which he encouraged all of his writers for Doctor Who to adopt – namely, to write a six parter as two linked stories, one of 4 parts and one of two parts. I’m not entirely sure how he would have done this with “The Space Pirates” if he had adopted this approach, but I do think that it would have been worth at least trying.

For all that it is 6 parts too long, and over padded, there isn’t a lot for The Doctor to do in the story, and it seems that there’s even less for Jamie and Zoe. After this one ended they only had one more story – albeit a 10 week story, and can you imagine what an anti-climax it would have been if this had actually been their last story together? I only hope that “The War Games” lives up to its reputation. (I’m sure that it does. I can still remember watching it first time round when I was five years old.) They deserve a good send off.

At this point, I am breathing more than just a sigh of relief that we’ve just seen the last of the recons. I thought it might be appropriate to say a word about them. It’s very easy to mock, and make nasty comments about them, and I for one will be delighted if the day ever comes when the missing episodes have all been animated. But let’s give credit to the people who have put them together to make them as watchable experience as possible for those people who want to get as close as possible to the experience of watching the original shows. Let’s spend a moment giving thanks to the memory of John Cura for taking the tele snaps that form the basis of so many of the recons. I haven’t tried watching a recon with vision off and only the sound on, but I can’t imagine for one moment that the experience is as enjoyable as watching a recon.

Having said all of that, I do hope that the BBC continues animating missing episodes. “The Reign of Terror”, “The Moonbase”, “The Ice Warriors” and “The Invasion” all benefit hugely from their animated episodes. “The Web of Fear” springs to mind as one story begging to have its recon replaced by an animated episode.

Coming back to “The Space Pirates”, it has its flaws, but it wasn’t terrible. Miles better than “Galaxy Four” and in fact probably about on a par with “The Dominators”, although for different reasons.

What Have We Learned?

Well, this story reinforced the point which was raised by Season Three’s “The Gunfighters”,that if it is not essential to ask a British actor to do an American accent, then don’t.