Doctor Who A-Z #49: The Space Pirates (1969)

Reviewing The Space Pirates demands you accept two things about 1960s Doctor Who. The first is that they absolutely churned the show out. There was an ambition, early on, to run it like a soap opera and have it on fifty-two weeks a year; this was wisely rethought before the end of William Hartnell’s first season, but even by the point of Patrick Troughton’s departure you’re still dealing with a forty-four week season. When the show returned in 1970 after a longer-than-usual break it would be substantially rethought and slimmed down, although this was because of the increased cost of colour television production rather than any show of mercy for the series’s poor cast. For now, it was necessary to give Troughton, Wendy Padbury and Frazer Hines holidays during the show’s run.

As a result, the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie turn up fairly late in episode one of The Space Pirates, and spend much of the next three episodes stuck on board an abandoned spaceship that is important to, but not quite central to, the rest of the action. Producer Peter Bryant seems to have decided to cover for their relative absence with spectacle, which leads to the other problem we have in assessing The Space Pirates: five of its six episodes no longer exist. The same ethos that led to a forty-four week season – namely, that television as a medium is closer to a daily theatre show than cinema – led to the BBC being fatally indifferent to the archiving of these shows. As a result, many episodes of Doctor Who (like most British shows of this era) have been lost. The Space Pirates doesn’t even have the benefit of John Cura’s “telesnaps”, meaning that I watched most episodes of this visually ambitious story as an audio recording overlaid onto some photographs of the cast that may, but often don’t, come from the same episode that I’m listening to. It’s no way to watch anything, let alone this.

From the surviving visual evidence, which basically means episode two and some photographs, the big surprise is that Bryant’s gamble paid off. The model shots of spaceships, which carry a big chunk of episode one, actually look terrific. Doctor Who doesn’t usually build stories around an effects process in this way, and normally when it does it’s a complete disaster: think Underworld, or The Web Planet. The effects here don’t rival 2001: A Space Odyssey, and nobody watching a BBC programme in the late ’60s would expect them to. But they’re definitely impressive, showcase some good, original spaceship designs and contain grace notes – like the lack of stars – clearly inspired by the Apollo missions that succeeded in putting a man on the moon somewhere in the middle of this story’s original broadcast.

It’s that eagerness to tap into space exploration fever, a completely natural impulse for a science fiction series on air in 1969, that trips The Space Pirates up. Writing the Doctor Who riposte to Apollo 11 would be a good job for a writer like Bill Strutton or William Emms, whose stories do, for all their flaws, have the right tone of gee-whiz space-age innocence. Unfortunately The Space Pirates has Robert Holmes, a writer as lauded as Strutton and Emms aren’t, but who nevertheless proves to be completely the wrong man for the mission. Holmes is lauded, after all, for his knack with Gothic horror stories and his cynical wit. It’s telling that, even when the show’s view of space exploration noticeably sours in the Pertwee years, Holmes leaves the stories about outer-space racism, war and genocide to other writers. The human failings Holmes sees as most likely to exist on other worlds are the ones he addresses in stories like Carnival of Monsters, or The Sun Makers: greed, con artistry, bureaucracy, lack of imagination. A writing duo like Bob Baker and Dave Martin could make even political pessimism into the stuff of grand adventure; for Holmes, it’s the small things that matter.

At his best, this is what makes him a legend of the series. At his worst, you get The Space Pirates. There is the possibility of satire in the idea of government red tape that reaches all the way out into space, which the titular pirates and the space cowboy Milo Clancy struggle and fail to escape. But this was broadcast at a point where even Nixon was getting a little reflected glory from the moon landings, so it isn’t explored. The government officials are just dull, lacking the texture and cruelty of a Pertwee-era bureaucrat. The pirates aren’t much more exciting either – there were long, embarrassing stretches where I forgot which side certain characters were on, which wasn’t helped by both factions wearing strangely knight-like space helmets and uniforms. This only leaves Milo Clancy, and… hoo boy, Milo Clancy.

Clancy is, as noted above, a space cowboy. Most spacefaring stories have a drop of Western in their DNA: Star Trek has its talk of frontiers, Han Solo is essentially a space rustler, Firefly turns it into a whole (slightly dodgy) Civil War allegory. Even Joss Whedon, though, would blanch at how literally The Space Pirates takes its cowboy theme. Played agonisingly by Gordon Gostelow, Clancy peppers his dialogue with yokel laughs and “darn tootin’!”s, never really managing to become funny. I suppose, if you squint, the presence of pirates and cowboys in a space exploration story could be a Holmesian touch, that something of the past is reasserting itself in these ultra-modern environs just as it would (more horrifically) in a story like The Ark in Space. But the collision of pirate and Western tropes never really adds up to anything, and in any case a large part of what’s fascinating about these stories is the era they take place in. It is fascinating that two instantly recognisable adventure-story genres are historical studies of times when countries had to balance the demands of establishing a civilisation and preserving freedom. Making it a space civilisation with space freedoms loses the depth and complexity of the real-life history while adding nothing at all.

Defenders of The Space Pirates have noted that it did reasonably well in the ratings at a time when Doctor Who as a whole was struggling, and the audience appreciation scores were strong as well. The implication is that if we could see more of this story, we might like it as much as people did in 1969. But bringing ratings and audience feedback into the argument is a double-edged sword. After The Space Pirates, Doctor Who would post its worst ratings to date in The War Games, a story now rightly regarded as one of the best the series ever produced. Similarly, while The Gunfighters remains divisive, even its most unforgiving detractors will assemble a better argument than just pointing to its famously awful Appreciation Index score. The difference is, we can watch The War Games and The Gunfighters and say that, in retrospect, they have positive qualities that were ignored at the time. Maybe if some more episodes of The Space Pirates were rediscovered, I’d be kinder to it. But the audience appreciation figures rated it as better than The Mind Robber and The Invasion. I can see why people in 1969 might think that: I can’t imagine why I would.

Next: The War Games (1969)

Graham’s Archive – The Space Pirates

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