Masterpiece Theatre
Number 7: The Space
Pirateszzzzzzz
The Space Pirates
is the first story in Masterpiece Theatre that is completely new to this
reviewer. Its reputation is pretty poor. It placed 195th in Doctor Who Magazine’s 2009 Mighty 200
Survey, sixth from bottom, making it the lowest ranked story we have looked at
thus far. Nobody really seems to remember much about it apart from the fact
that it is slow and dull.
It would be unreasonable then to expect anything
particularly stunning. However it would be reasonable to hope to be
entertained. Sadly any such hopes were not just dashed, but thrown bodily from
a cliff and impaled on the rocks below before being pecked apart by seagulls.
My God, The Space
Pirates is boring. It’s quite possibly the dullest Doctor Who story ever filmed, and that says a lot when I’ve sat
through Colony in Space and The Mutants. It starts badly. We spend
what seems like hours with the dullest Space Corps in the universe, watching as
the same raid on the beacons is carried out by the titular space pirates THREE
times. The man in command, General Hermack, is possessed of a theatrical voice,
an ever-changing accent and no personality. He makes no command decisions of
worth in the entire story, and just chases shadows throughout the six episodes.
The Doctor never meets him, yet we spend what seems like more than half the 150
minute running time in his excruciating presence.
As for the Doctor, he doesn’t turn up for the first fifteen
minutes of episode one, as if he knows that this is going to be bad and
therefore wants to keep his presence in the tale as brief as possible. Behind
the scenes we know that the regulars, Patrick Troughton in particular, was
unhappy with the amount of lines he had to learn and the lack of time he was
given to do it. So The Space Pirates becomes a ‘Doctor-lite’ story in a similar
vein to The Keys of Marinus and Blink, but without the quality of
supporting characters and strength of idea to hold the interest. The TARDIS
team enliven the tale every time they appear, but that is more to do with the
sheer banality of The Space Pirates
than anything Jamie, Zoe and the Doctor actually do. In fact all they seem to
do is find themselves trapped in enclosed spaces while the story happens around
them, until eventually they are trapped in one of those enclosed spaces with a
character who is at the centre of the plot.
I ought to make a confession here; Science fiction – hard
science fiction – does nothing for me. Star
Cops, Outcasts, Arthur C. Clarke,
and E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith – all dull. My efforts to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey always go like this; watch some monkeys fight
each other, watch a spaceship spin, watch some people in zero-gravity, watch
the insides of my eyelids and snore gently. Sci-fi works best when it assumes
the trappings of other genres. Star Wars
is terrific because it’s a pulp serial like Flash
Gordon. Aliens is wonderful
because it’s an action film. Alien
and Event Horizon are horror movies.
I love Deep Space Nine because it’s a
seven-series war film. And Doctor Who
is a fantasy adventure series that uses sci-fi as a platform for its stories. What
do you get when you try to make Doctor Who realistic? You get Attack of the Cybermen with Lytton’s
crushed hands oozing blood, because Eric Saward says that’s what would have
happened.
So in a way, The Space
Pirates and I were never going to get along. The admittedly admirable
attempts to show space travel in a realistic way mean that we are subjected to
a bomb countdown sequence that starts at fifty-five minutes, which is not
exactly going to have the audience on the edge of their seat biting their
nails. Endless, repetitive sequences of docking and launching spaceships don’t
help either, unless they are Vipers in the original Battlestar Galactica or the Scorpio in Blake’s Seven that at least launch in an arresting visual style,
even if it is the same effect every single time.
The story has clearly been stretched beyond breaking point
to fill its six-episode allocation, and that’s one of the biggest problems. It
is my opinion that six episodes is too long for any story, and that there has
never been a totally successful six-parter in the history of Doctor Who. Oooh, controversial, aren’t
I? I mean, we’re lumping The Talons of
Weng-Chiang and Genesis of the Daleks
in with that sweeping statement, aren’t we? But the main problem with six-part
stories is that the pace has to be slowed down to allow them to last the
two-and-a-half hours running time. Talons,
whilst utterly brilliant and patently one of the best Doctor Who stories of
all-time, relies on its villain misplacing his time cabinet for the first four
episodes before he can actually become a proper threat to more than just
kidnapped prostitutes. In fact, Talons
follows the best structure of a six-part story, which is to break it down into
a four-part, then a two-part, usually in a different environment. This works
well for The Seeds of Doom, The Invasion of Time, Utopia/ The Sound of Drums/ The Last of the
Time Lords and less successfully for The
Time Monster and Planet of the
Spiders. Stories like The Space
Pirates or Frontier in Space,
where that doesn’t really happen because the writer is showing space to be a
rather large place, tend to drag as a result.
But there are a lot of scenes of padding in all six-parters
which slow the pace down. Genesis
rattles along very nicely indeed, but the characters spend whole episodes
travelling between the Kaled and Thal Domes. It’s a classic story, but just
think how good Genesis would be with
all of the fat stripped away. Modern Doctor
Who writers are told to take out all extraneous scenes and plot threads
until the story runs as fast as it possibly can, and I think this partially
explains why Doctor Who is so popular
nowadays. The scene before the titles in the modern incarnation is the
equivalent of episode one of a classic adventure. Thirty seconds to set the
scene is infinitely more preferably to twenty-five minutes to do the same job.
Purists may argue, but Doctor Who is
driven by the plot and character interactions. World-building occurs anyway
when the story is well-written.
What was magical when watching/ listening to The Space Pirates was the fact that it
was there at all. This is a story that was ostensibly destroyed around forty
years ago, yet someone recorded the soundtrack off the telly and others spent
considerable amount of time reconstructing the soundtracks and adding pictures
and subtitles to explain the action, with no sense of profit or personal gain.
No other series inspires such loving devotion. Maybe no other series deserves
it. But my thanks go out this time to Loose
Cannon Productions for their excellent version of this story. All Loose Cannon’s reconstructions are done
for the fans, with no monetary compensation even hinted at. The images were
clear and the sound was crisp, and the subtitles helped me make sense of all those
scenes with the warbling space lady on the soundtrack and the unintelligible
conversations between Milo and Dom Issigri. A truly excellent piece of work –
visit their website at www.recons.com for
more information. Thanks Loose Cannoneers!
By the way, I’ll be covering The Savages,
Galaxy Four and The Underwater Menace at some point in the near future, if you’d
like to send me copies of the reconstructions for those stories (he says
cheekily)!
All this talk about six-parters and reconstructions has
successfully stopped me from having to talk too much about The Space Pirates, and maybe that’s the way it should be. However,
as forgettable as much of the story is, there are still several reasons why
every Doctor Who fan worth his or her salt should give it a try at least once.
Ten Reasons The Space Pirates steal the glory
1.
Major Ian Warne, a man who has nothing better to
do than follow General Hermack’s orders and sit in a space chair staring
directly into the camera. He does this so well that he manages to disguise the
fact he appears to be wearing an Ice Lord’s helmet. Plus he’s played by Donald
Gee, who was so excellent as Eckersley in The
Monster of Peladon, where presumably he sheepishly returned his pilfered
Ice Lord helmet to Commander Azaxyr. I like to think he took on an entire Ice
Warrior phalanx single-handed and defeated them all, so his helmet was a trophy
of battle. That’s why General Hermack calls him by his first name; the
theatrical General with the many accents is scared of him and with good reason.
The man’s so hard he defies the first rule of television in that no character
may have the name of a previous character.
2.
I wrote here that Rohm Dutt was the father of
Stotz from The Caves of Androzani.
Well, here in The Space Pirates we
have what must be Stotz’s grandfather in Caven. He is the original gunrunner,
and his DNA carries right through the years until finally it reaches a
character worthy enough. My favourite line? ‘If he can walk, get him out of
here. If he can’t, leave him.’ Still not entirely sure what happens to him at
the end of the story though – I presume he is blown up along with his crew by
super-hard Ian Warne.
3.
Thunderbirds had been showing for nearly five
years before Doctor Who finally
jumped on the bandwagon and showed proper spaceships in flight. We have gotten
so used to good special effects nowadays in Doctor
Who that it is easy to forget just how weak some of the model effects were
at times, or even how often no exterior was ever shown. The Space Pirates’ minnow ships wear their Anderson influence with
pride, and the fly-by shots of Hermack’s ship are impressive for such an
under-budget programme as Doctor Who
was at the time, and are certainly better than the Hyperion III in Terror of the Vervoids for example,
seventeen years later.
4.
The Space Pirates boasts the first truly
off-kilter performance in Gordon Gostelow’s Milo Clancy. It would have been too
easy to have played him as another Steven Taylor type, but instead we get a Wario-lookalike
from Super Mario dressed as a cowboy.
Clancy’s southern drawl and lackadaisical approach to space-travel is a
refreshing change to the overload of earnest characters in the story, and there
are echoes of the Doctor in his attempts to keep his spaceship, the Liz-79, in
something close to working order. Even Jamie questions the safety of travelling
in the Liz, and he’s recently seen the TARDIS explode. Sure there are times
when you cannot understand a blimmin’ word Clancy says, but he spends the
entire story defending his skewed outlook on life and you’ve got to like him
for that.
5.
After falling down a hole during the cliffhanger
to episode three, the TARDIS team land unscathed (Who’d have thought that would
happen?) apart from the Doctor who makes noises of pain. His companions show
concern until the Doctor pulls a battered packet of drawing pins out of his
pocket where they have been sticking into him. Zoe looks at him in puzzlement,
asking ‘What have you got drawing pins for?’ The Doctor replies in a defensive voice: ‘I
like drawing pins. Usually...’ This is perfect pure Troughton, and for me the
best moment in the entire story.
6.
The story lifts every time the Doctor, Jamie and
Zoe appear, which in the early episodes in never enough. Their banter is easy
and funny, but when the situation turns desperate the Doctor immediately tells his friends
the truth. There is a level of trust and affection there that few TARDIS teams
can match.
7.
Trapped in yet another locked room, the Doctor
attempts to use a tuning fork to open the door as in the future doors are
locked by keycards possessing a resonating note. He fails miserably until
Jamie, having failed too, chucks away the tuning fork in disgust. When it lands
it of course hits the perfect note and the door slides open. It’s a brilliant
slapstick moment.
8.
Although he is a relatively poorly-drawn
character in the early episodes, Dervish reveals himself as a man with a
conscience who is doing the wrong things for material gains. What is interesting
about him is that he questions Caven’s orders, especially when it will lead to
someone’s death, but then he follows that order anyway. His instinct for self-preservation
overrides his sense of decency.
9.
The Space
Pirates obviously doesn’t exist in visual form anymore, apart from episode
two, so it almost becomes a Big Finish production in that the only faculty we
can use is our hearing and our imaginations have to do the rest. However, it is all-too-easy to end up
listening to the battle of the accents instead. We have Hermack, presumably of dubious
American/ Germanic/ Russian origins, Ian Warne’s American accent, Clancy’s
mumbling drawl, Madeleine’s over-enunciated speech and Dom Issigri’s barely
intelligible noises. I’m not sure who wins, but I’m hard-pressed to think of
another Doctor Who story with quite
so many odd accents occurring at once, often in the same scene.
10.
The ingenious, almost MacGyver-esque manner in
which the Doctor uses what little he has at his disposal to escape the endless
series of locked rooms in which he finds himself.
The Space Pirates is
hard work, make no bones about it. However, if you manage to get through the
first episode and a half, the story does lift and there is enjoyment to be had.
The story’s biggest problem is that everyone seemed to have their eye on the next
story, The War Games, which would see
the entire TARDIS team leave, and would in all likelihood be the final ever
story. Mercifully things turned out differently, and if the cost of another
forty-three years and counting was a weaker story, then we should forgive The Space Pirates for being the one that
took the fall.
Next Time: Nightmare
of Eden
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