Doctor Who A-Z #28: The Smugglers (1966)

The ‘pure historicals’ – stories whose only science-fictional aspect is the TARDIS and the Doctor – haven’t been subjected to much scholarship compared to the rest of Doctor Who. This is probably because they’re superficially harder to relate to the modern version of the show than anything else from the classic series – but only superficially. Elizabeth Sandifer has posited a difference between the “Lucarotti” style of pure historical and the “Spooner” style, the two versions named after their most frequent authors. Summarising Sandifer’s arguments generally does them a disservice, but I’ll give it a go: one of the fundamental differences between the two schools is that Lucarotti historicals are fascinated by the process of history, and what happens when the Doctor intervenes in it, while the Spooner historicals are more about the Doctor entering genres that happen to take place in Earth’s past.

Dennis Spooner is, of course, the writer who solved the problem of pure historicals in The Time Meddler, which introduced science fiction elements into a historical setting. Because of this, you might expect that every future story in this vein is Spooneresque by definition, but that’s not quite the case. Stories like Pyramids of Mars, Rogue, or most of Matt Smith’s historical stories, stick to the Spooner ethos of using history as a road into genre. Stories like The Masque of Mandragora, The Girl in the Fireplace or Jodie Whittaker’s historical stories, on the other hand, still have an identifiable Lucarotti influence. It’s not even as simple as saying the Lucarotti stories are serious and the Spooner stories are comedies; while the focus on genre in Spooner and his acolyte Donald Cotton’s work certainly lends itself to humour, they’re disarmingly likely to end up in some terrible historical massacre or disaster.

It is, then, a porous border, which is how you get stories like The Smugglers. The Smugglers is written by neither John Lucarotti nor Dennis Spooner; it’s written by Brian Hayles, who after The Celestial Toymaker seemed like he would be the series’s fantasy specialist. His decision to branch out and write something completely different is laudably ambitious, but in practice he makes the same mistake Spooner did with The Reign of Terror; writing a Spooneresque historical genre story without any of the comedic or science-fictional elements that might allow this outside narrative to be subverted into a Doctor Who story. The Reign of Terror was, at least, Spooner’s first script for the series. He learned from it. Just two stories after The Smugglers, however, the pure historical would cease to be a regular part of Doctor Who, and Hayles would never be able to get to grips with the form.

I realise that this issue of subversion might seem a bit academic; if the story is entertaining enough, who cares whether the genre is subverted? But I think genre subversion is a crucial enough part of Doctor Who‘s identity that, even if you don’t consciously think about it, you notice something’s awry when it doesn’t happen. As far back as An Unearthly Child, the Doctor was comparing the TARDIS not to a spaceship or a Wellsian time machine, but a television set: each new story is not so much a voyage, more a change of the channel. The idea that a show’s heroes are able to cross into other shows is inherently mischievous and subversive, and it makes it apparent when a Doctor Who story lacks that ethos. The Smugglers is a fairly rote story about the hunt for buried treasure. The Doctor finds the treasure, yes, but this isn’t a matter that requires his particular expertise – it’s the kind of thing a thousand and one adventure story heroes could do, and as the serial ends you’re forced to conclude you’d rather have watched them do it. It’s the kind of plot that might have passed muster in the first season, when the show’s crew were still working out what kind of hero the Doctor was. This, however, is sandwiched in between The War Machines and The Tenth Planet, a point where it makes no sense whatsoever.

Indeed, the only interesting thing about the treasure hunt the story is based around – apart from the fact that it’s Henry Avery’s treasure, making this a premature sequel to the Matt Smith story The Curse of the Black Spot – is that the Doctor works it out despite getting the wrong clues. In the first episode, actor Terence de Marney gives the first word of the code as “Smallwood”, but by episode three the Doctor has corrected it to “Smallbeer”. As usual, Hartnell muffs a few lines here and there – I’m very fond of the TARDIS tour he gives Ben and Polly, where he says something like “this scanner is what I call a scanner” – but this is one of those occasions where the guest cast outpace him. There’s a very amusing moment where Michael Godfrey mispronounces the line “What makes you think I’m like a gentleman?” as “What makes you think I like gentlemen?”, which casts a whole new light on Hartnell’s response: “Your dress, your manner, your taste…”

Was The Smugglers simply under-rehearsed? Director Julia Smith’s only other Doctor Who credit was The Underwater Menace, which does not make a great case for her as a director, but there’s more to life than Who. She also served as co-creator, director and producer of Eastenders, and directed the well-remembered 1967 TV serial version of The Railway Children. Some of her instincts are strong. She was eager to film this story, with its overtones of Stevenson, Du Maurier and Barrie, on location in Cornwall; when this necessitated cost-cutting she suggested removing the musical score. That worked tremendously well in No Country for Old Men, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have worked in Doctor Who. The fundamental problem is No Country for Old Men was a Coen brothers adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, and this is a story where people repeatedly mistake Anneke Wills for a boy because she’s wearing trousers.

It’s hard to imagine any story that wouldn’t be overshadowed by the show’s first-ever regeneration coming straight after it. Even today, as things like Legend of the Sea Devils and Boom Town prove, there’s little glory in being a lead actor’s penultimate story. (Well, unless it’s The Day of the Doctor) But The Smugglers feels even more inconsequential as a late example of a subgenre that’s been shuffling towards the exit for a good year now. There is still a ghost of these pure historical stories in the modern series, and the best of them make the case that the subgenre deserves more respect as a vital building block of early Who. The Smugglers, by contrast, is notable primarily as an explanation for why this strand of the series was phased out. The pure historicals have never felt like more of a dead end than they do here.

Next: The Tenth Planet (1966)

Graham’s Archive – The Smugglers

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