The Space Pirates

Chapter The 105th, a Western in space; but probably not as exciting as that sounds.

Plot: 
In the far future, International Rescue, sorry, the Space Corps, led by Jeff Tracy, sorry General Hermack, investigate the recent destruction of space beacons made of an expensive metal, argonite. The beacons are being broken up, and the pieces space-towed away by pirates to be melted down. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on one of these beacons, just as it is blown up; trapped, with limited oxygen, they sit out the story for approximately two episodes. Meanwhile, General Hermack tracks Milo Clancey - an old-timey prospector type like you get in space - in his battered ship. Milo is trying to find the space pirates, who've been stealing his cargoes too. The General suspects that Milo is really their ringleader. This is implausible and there's no real evidence to suggest it, but General Hermack is an idiot.

Milo rescues the TARDIS team, and they all travel to the nearby planet Ta. This is the base of a mining company run by Madeleine Issigri, daughter of Milo's missing (and presumed dead) old partner Dom. Madeleine's company has loads or argonite, even though the planet's mines were thought to be worked out, and she uses the same model of ships as the pirates, and Ta is in the right part of space to be the pirate's base. General Hermack doesn't suspect a thing. Eventually, the Doctor and friends discover that the pirates - led by a nasty piece of work called Caven - are in league with Madeleine. When she baulks at using lethal violence to frame Milo for their crimes, Caven puts pressure on her through threats to her father, who turns out to be alive and being held captive in the underground mines of Ta. Working together, the good guys escape the clutches of Caven and persuade the Space Corps who's really to blame for the piracy. The TARDIS team have a good old laugh at the prospect of another trip in Milo's rackety ship to locate the section of beacon where they left the TARDIS. Roll credits.

Context:

As everyone reading this will probably know, the archives of Doctor Who's black and white years are somewhat depleted. Several episodes broadcast between the series' start in 1963 and the transmission of The Space Pirates in 1969 are no longer held, and are not known to exist anywhere in the world (though some intrepid folks are still looking). Everything following The Space Pirates is present and more-or-less correct. There were several methods used to keep the stories shown in those days: the BBC would make film copies from the subsequently wiped master tapes, but those would eventually get junked. This was the fate of 5 of the 6 episodes of The Space Pirates, with only episode 2 remaining. The crew would sometimes hire a private contractor to take off-screen photos of the action as it was broadcast, which could then be used as a demonstration of the production. This practice had stopped by the time of this story, though. Finally, early tech-adopter fans would record the audio from their TV set's output. Through this last method, fans today can at least hear every story from the early years, even if they can't see them.

The off-screen photos and audio tracks have been married together for various missing episodes to create unofficial (and a couple of official) reconstructions; but, for cases like The Space Pirates where limited visual material exists, the makers of these have to fudge things so much, it can be distracting for me. So, I listened instead to the official CD release, which has narration by Fraser Hines explaining the action. I did this over several days, usually as an accompaniment to washing up or cleaning in the kitchen. I then listed to the whole thing again, as I enjoyed it and wanted to make sure I'd taken it all in. Finally, I watched episode 2 - which was released on the Lost in Time box set of orphaned episodes -  to get a feel for the visual identity of the story. The quality of restoration on the DVD is remarkably high.

First-time round:

I saw episode 2 for the first time in 1991 when it was released with another couple of episodes on The Troughton Years VHS. The episodes shown on these compilations were given scant context nor plot synopsis; with a story one wasn't familiar with, there was a lot of guesswork required to figure out the action of a middle episode. Such a presentation didn't do The Space Pirates any favours, particularly as the second episode features little of the stars of the show, and is in the slower introductory section of the story. The story as a whole I caught up with in February 2003, when the aforementioned audio CD was released. Finally, in 2004, when the aforementioned Lost in Time set was released, I saw the second episode again in better quality; the set also contained a couple of brief clips from other episodes.

Reaction

Robert Holmes was one of the most prolific and well regarded writers of Doctor Who in the 20th Century. He was the writer chosen to pen Jon Pertwee's launch story - a big deal as it was to a certain extent a reboot, and was the first ever colour story. Thereafter, Holmes contributed a script most years (all of them memorable stories) before taking over as script editor in line with Tom Baker's debut, a role which he held for three and a bit years. During this period, which many fans think of as a golden age, he did a job very similar to the modern showrunners: he commissioned, edited, and rewrote to a greater or lesser degree every story in the series at that time. He also wrote some key stories (all of them memorable) in this period, although this was less by design and usually because other scripts had fallen through. After he left the post, he continued to write stories for the show until his death, and a significant proportion of the stories he was responsible for are high up in fan polls. A lot of people think the first two Doctor Who stories he wrote in the final year of Patrick Troughton's tenure - The Krotons, and particularly The Space Pirates - are shit.

It's an odd phenomenon. It's as if some people think the black-and-white Robert Holmes was a different guy with the same name, or that he regenerated in parallel with the Doctor in 1969. This couldn't help but affect my expectations going in, and probably explained why I enjoyed The Space Pirates so much. It could never be as bad as the reputation that preceded it, and I was pleasantly surprised. There are lots of signs in the script that this is the same Robert Holmes of later, more popular stories. There are larger than life characters of both the comic and nasty types, there's witty dialogue, there's explicit borrowing of another genre to enrich the story. This is an Old West gold rush story transplanted into deep space - with a dollop of Gerry Anderson's Supermarionation, some Scooby Doo, and a pinch of Apollo mission TV coverage too. It's not trying to hide any of this: it's a story proud of its roots.

All in all, I found it a very enjoyable listen, even on the second run-through when any goodwill from lowered expectations should have worn off. It's criticised for not having much input from the regulars, and they are certainly used sparingly in several of the episodes. The final part only features them in pre-shot sequences, as they were all off filming The War Games, and didn't attend that studio session at all.  Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines and Wendy Padbury are so good, though, and so established as a team by now (in their penultimate story), that a little goes a long way. Holmes has a particular knack for writing the second doctor's childlike wonder - I love the scene where he's using a bag of marbles pulled from his pocket as part of a villain-knobbling wheeze, but retrieves the green one because it's his favourite. The story also cops flack for lots of dull padding. I'm pretty sure it's on record that this started out as a four-parter that had to be extended to six episodes to patch up holes in the schedule from other scripts; but, it didn't ever drag for very long for this listener.

The 'twist' at the end of part four is obvious to anyone with a brain cell, yes, but it looks to me like it was supposed to be. It's a bit panto, but my take is that the audience is supposed to be clued in from the off, screaming 'She's behind you!' at General Hermack as he stubbornly suspects the wrong person. There are some dodgy performances, accents and moustaches, yes, but there's also some touchingly real material about the father-daughter relationship between Dom and Madeleine. There's some cheap-looking costumes and sets, but then there's the excellent model work. There's some terrible dialogue, and there's some great dialogue.  This all balances out to make a decent adventure from an underrated era, and I'd happily enjoy it a third time. But, what do I know? I think The Krotons is pretty good too.

Connectivity: 

Two stories in a row to feature spaceships that have their cargoes stolen by nefarious individuals hungry for profit.

Deeper Thoughts:
Adventures in Missing. It's not just certain Doctor Who stories that can't be seen, of course. Lots of TV from the same era is lost, and almost all TV from a certain point earlier than that is gone forever, simply because it was never recorded at all: it went out live once, and that was that. Cinema is impacted too, with many early silent era movies - when the medium was seen as ephemeral in the same way as was early television - not retained. Things don't have to be that old either. There are more recent movies that never get finished, and TV shows that are sitting on a shelf having never been broadcast, or shown once and never repeated again. Even inveterate collectors such as me know that we don't have a right to see and own everything; it feels unfair, though, when we get tantalising glimpses but can't see the whole thing. While the web and streaming services, and a somewhat cavalier attitude to copyright they created, have made it much easier to track down interesting curios, they've also made it easier to get those tantalising but incomplete glimpses too.

Case in point (but a nice case in point with a happy ending): The Other Side of the Wind, an infamous project filmed over many years with bits and pieces of financing keeping it going during the first half of the 1970s, intended to be director Orson Welles' Hollywood comeback. I'd long been fascinated with the film, after seeing clips in a documentary I saw on the BBC in the 1990s, One Man Band: The Lost Films of Orson Welles. This was a fascinating selection of clips from incomplete Orson opuses, shared from his personal archive by his partner (both romantic and creative) Oja Kodar. See, it's not just Doctor Who fans who are avid enough to consume such compendia; this doco was the Welles equivalent of The Troughton Years, and just as frustrating for the fan. The couple of clips shown from The Other Side of the Wind were entrancing, and provoked many speculations on what kind of plot could possibly join them up. Legal complications arising from all those bits and pieces of financing kept the film in limbo for decades, unseen by all but a select few. I'd given up hope of ever seeing it, but it has just become available of Netflix after Herculean efforts in untangling the issues, and editing together the footage.

Having now watched it, I can attest that it is every bit the work of crazy genius I expected. How did those two clips integrate into the whole? They didn't. They didn't need to. It's that sort of picture: a tapestry of sometimes wonderful, sometimes flawed moments, a time capsule of an era of change in Hollywood, like a chapter of Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls filmed as it was happening. It couldn't, though, live up to what I had imagined before it was shown. Now I've seen it, it's already fading, becoming just another artifact rather than the ball of potential energy it was, a helix of infinite possibilities. Much the same had happened with the Doctor Who stories discovered during my lifetime (like Tomb of the Cybermen or Enemy of the World) as they settled in to reality after exploding any preconceptions I might have had, good or bad. Much the same would no doubt happen with The Space Pirates if it was ever found: I get the feeling it would be reappraised and found much better than anyone thought, if all its visuals were available. It would then rapidly be taken for granted once it was just another file to download or box on a shelf.

The trade off is the same in all cases; the loss of potential is compensated by availability. I can watch The Other Side of the Wind any time I like now, until I'm as familiar with it as any other long ago released film in Welles' oeuvre. Or, at least, I can as long as Netflix keep it available: they own the means of distribution. I was worried, though not surprised, in reading recently the news that John Lewis has stopped selling DVD players after a 40% downturn in sales as customers move more and more to streaming services for their entertainment needs. I've been tracking the slow death of physical media in blog posts passim, but this has still come around a bit quick. I have a lot invested in shiny discs, including hundreds of Doctor Who stories. I saw the same thing happen with video cassettes: I had a bunch of tapes long after I had the means to watch them . How long will it be before they come for Blu-ray players too? If they do, then I've got a very expensive collection of coasters, and the shift of power will be back where it was before home media - the whims of the broadcaster, rather than the viewer, will dictate if and when you can watch something. I just hope that happens long after I finish this blog; it's awful when things are left incomplete.

In Summary:
I'm surprisingly loving these m****r-f***ing pirates on this m****r-f***ing space beacon.