T: I remember looking in the Doctor Who Programme Guide and being shocked that this universally unadored adventure (even Doctor Who – A Celebration, which only had true ire for The Gunfighters, said this moved at a snail’s pace) had such an impressive cast on paper. Jack May from The Archers as General Hermack? Donald Gee from The Doctor Who Monster Book (the only non regular actor to get a thank you in the back due to a picture of him as Eckersley) as Major Ian Warne? Even It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum’s George Layton as the lowly technician Penn? Impressive! Especially Jack May, as I was brought up having to endure The Archers (usually in omnibus form on a Sunday) as I helped Mum in the garden or kitchen, or we were on a long car journey somewhere. The only respite to the ooh-arrs and bumpkins droning on about butter and cows was the fruity and charming presence of the roguish Nelson Gabriel, played by May. He was easily the best character in the series, and something of a radio legend. And it was always good to see him occasionally crop up elsewhere, and to hear his reassuringly witty voice in Count Duckula. He even did the eulogy for Patrick Troughton on Radio 4, as a tribute to his recently deceased old mate.
But now, here Jack May is! In all his glory! On Doctor Who!... and, well, he’s rubbish. I genuinely have no idea what he’s trying to do. He seems to attempt an American accent for approximately his first two minutes on screen, then wisely gives up. His delivery is determinedly odd, it truly is. It doesn’t help that most of this episode is spent with him and Major Warne, the two dullest spacemen yet seen in the series. They make Captain Maitland from The Sensorites seem positively wacky.
And the script isn’t doing May any favours – to get the exposition out of the way, Robert Holmes resorts to giving Hermack a turgidly lengthy amount of info-dumping to his crew, and even Hermack admits that they already know much of what he’s telling them. This Robert Holmes chap showed a bit of promise in The Krotons, the shortcomings of which I went out of my way to pin on the production team. But with this story, any culpability has to be laid firmly at Holmes’ doorstep. And maybe at Patrick Troughton’s too, if complaining about his workload resulted in this sort of non-event. Gosh, I can’t believe I’m saying this – everything that is wrong with this is down to my two favourite Doctor Who people of all time! It’s like having the worst night of your life with the girl of your dreams...
On the plus side, the sleekness of the models is very pleasing, and Dudley Simpson’s music really catches the mood, effectively using the services of a (space) opera singer. And the space pirate leader, Caven (whom I had thought was “Kay-ven” rather than “Kavvan” until I first heard the soundtrack) is effectively unpleasant, telling his men matter-of-factly to bring the captured Lieutenant Sorba if he can walk – but that if he can’t, to leave him to his inevitable death. Caven is quite a clinical murderer; he’s not an evil sadist, he’s just a brutal, cold, money-grabber.
Hermack tells us that he’s going to find Caven even if it takes the next ten years. Good God! If the story carries on like this, it’s certainly going to feel like that long.
May 1st
The Space Pirates episode two
R: The space drifter Milo Clancey may be the sort of Wild West parody who says “howdy” and “tarnation” a lot, but hey – he also moans about his solar-powered toaster, and is more concerned with his breakfast than he is all that dull space protocol stuff I had to listen to yesterday. So I think he’s great. Yes, Gordon Gostelow gives a larger than life performance – but by God, it’s what this story needs! And it’s full of little subtleties. The mock amazement at realising that young Warne is a major, the deliberate way that in being so impressed by the quality of Hermack’s spaceship he can show how much he despises it. If there’s one fault to Gostelow, it’s that he makes everyone else seem even more strait-laced and tedious in contrast. Even Donald Gee! I like Donald Gee. After Chesterton, I’m automatically sympathetic to any character called Ian. Before Milo turns up, Ian Warne is the likeable one of the story – and he becomes something of a miserable prig.
What’s peculiar is that, with all this barnstorming comedy going on elsewhere, Troughton is offering in contrast an unusually serious performance. You can almost hear in your head how the production team expect Troughton to play the scene where his experiments with magnetism shoot him and his friends deeper into space away from safety – that there’d be a little burst of comic wailing, as he calls himself an idiot. He refuses to do it. He plays all his scenes clean, and with solemn intent. The result is quite brilliant. All these sequences of the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe stranded on the beacon feel increasingly like padding, but by playing the crisis so straight – his telling Zoe off for being a pessimist not comic banter at all, but beautifully underplayed – Troughton brings a real tension to an episode that would otherwise have felt flaccid. It’ll never be seen as one of his stand-out moments, lying on the floor with his friends, trying to suck out the last bit of oxygen from a canister, but it’s the Doctor played with a grimness that we haven’t seen for a long while. If only one episode of The Space Pirates had to be in the archives, then I’m glad it’s this one, just so we can see Troughton in his penultimate story still approaching the part from a fresh angle. The pained defeatism he shows as he’s forced to reveal to his friends that they’ve no longer any chance of survival, not even wanting to look at them, his voice drained of energy, is gobsmackingly good.
T: Call me old fashioned, but I think I’d prefer it if the episode of The Space Pirates that existed had some actual space pirates in it. And that the TARDIS crew did something of note. I mean, c’mon – it takes until the end of this episode for the TARDIS crew to even meet another character. For the majority of new Doctor Who, that’s the length of an entire story!
Fortunately, it’s so much easier to pick out the positives when one can actually see what’s going on. You’ve mentioned most of them, as they generally come from Gordon Gostelow, who injects a bit of manic energy into this hitherto straight-laced little jaunt. Clancey not only hates his solar toaster, he bungs the burnt toast on the floor behind him. (You’ve never been to my messy house, have you? If you had, you’d probably know why I feel that Clancey’s a bit of a kindred spirit.) Why, I was even going to call my firstborn Milo (not, I hasten to add, because of Doctor Who – I just like the name) until The Tweenies got there first. And Clancey mends his malfunctioning light by banging a panel with a hammer – which is about the extent of my technological know-how.
Meanwhile, it’s clear to everyone apart from the characters themselves that the head of Issigri Mining Corporation, Madeleine Issigri (and her metal hair-hat), is a baddie. She comes equipped with some nifty tall silver wine vessels, and an equally sleek and metallic bottle – though the illusion is hampered somewhat when she pours Hermack a drink but no liquid comes out. (Perhaps she thinks he’s had enough.) Hermack himself, much as I might wish otherwise, continues to succeed in the monumental feat of being both stultifyingly boring and astronomically thick. And my ears must be playing tricks on me – this week, I’ve decided that May might be attempting a Russian accent. But at least his really odd enunciation distracts us from the terrible exposition he is forced to do again, this time telling Madeleine stuff she already knows for our benefit.
I don’t know what it is about this story, Rob... this close to the finish line for the Troughton era, am I running out of steam? Or is it because I empathically feel that since the TARDIS regulars haven’t properly bothered to show up for this party, I needn’t either? As you pointed out, last week’s episode (barring Mission to the Unknown, of course) set a record for the longest time lapse between the episode starting and the arrival of the regulars. Well, recap aside (in which all they do is tumble about for two seconds), they look like they’re having another go at it, not turning up for a full seven minutes.
Let me put it this way: there’s talk of a mind probe. It’s a damning indictment of this story that even mention of the infamous Gallifreyan Castellan Embarrasser isn’t enough to distract me from the
tedium on display here.
The Space Pirates episode three
R: I’m in a bit of a quandary. Here I am, halfway through No-one’s Favourite Troughton Story. And unlike you, I’m rather enjoying it. Is it possible to enjoy something for the wrong reasons?
Because I think, left to my own devices, I’d probably concur that this really isn’t very good. The plotting is very slow. The characters are very broadly drawn. And, perhaps most telling of all, three episodes in, and all the Doctor cares about is getting his TARDIS back. He doesn’t give a stuff about these space pirates, so why should I?
And the truth of the matter is, I don’t care. The whole thing is rather washing over me. But I like it, strangely enough, for that very reason. This is Doctor Who so off-kilter that I find it strangely beguiling. You’ve got characters like General Hermack, who are so positively stupid that they don’t recognise that Madeleine Issigri is the most suspicious femme fatale since Lauren Bacall told Bogart to whistle. You can use that as a stick to beat this story with – but isn’t his dense detective work part of the fun? It’s not as if the adventure is trying to disguise Madeleine’s guilt – so isn’t Hermack just a comic character (like Duggan, say, from City of Death) played so straight by Jack May that we’re inclined to take him seriously? And then, on the other hand, you’ve got Gordon Gostelow, turning everything into humourous bluster – but all to disguise the fact that Clancey is the most intelligent and independent character of the lot, and that there’s a darker side behind his comedic patina. (In that way, he very much anticipates a lot of Robert Holmes’ most interesting characters still to come.) It seems to me that the actors are playing this all against type – the comic buffoon played straight, the wily maverick played like a fool. It doesn’t necessarily work. But it’s rather a clever intent, isn’t it?
And the scale of the thing! After the way that Hartnell’s Who tried to see the whole universe as its oyster, only a fraction of Troughton’s stories have set foot off Earth. (Even Pertwee, who’s exiled to the bloody planet, pops around different worlds more freely than Troughton does!) And yet, here we are with a story that genuinely takes pleasure in racing around different planets – there’s Lobos, there’s Ta; for the first time since The Daleks’ Master Plan, of all things, there’s a story which wants to use a huge canvas. Okay, we can’t see these places, and they were probably just a bunch of corridors, but it’s as if at its last gasp, Troughton’s tenure has gone from its claustrophobic template into widescreen.
Yet this is as unlike The Daleks’ Master Plan as you can get. Because for all that I’ve just described, this isn’t remotely epic – Clancey delights in being mundane, and even the pirates themselves are coolly down to earth. This is a big adventure, and yet it’s not at all, it’s intimate. This is a space opera, and yet it’s really a self-regarding comedy. This is Doctor Who, but Doctor Who’s barely in it. It’s a mistake, most probably. But there’s nothing else like it. Is it possible to enjoy a story for that reason, the wrong reason, that it’s getting it all back to front? Does that make me a bad person, Toby?
T: Nope, it doesn’t. Doubly so, because I suspect that you’re taking one for the team, and are letting me off the hook so I can just declare this is rubbish before nipping out to do my shopping. But if I did that, I’d owe you a favour, and who knows what story down the road you might insist that I say something nice about, just to balance the scales.
So... what do I like about this? Well, Wendy Padbury is continuing to shine. It’s a common complaint from Doctor Who girls that whatever groundbreaking roles they were promised, their characters were gradually eroded away until they were reduced to asking stupid questions and screaming. That’s not a complaint Padbury could legitimately make, I think. She had the learning machines business in The Krotons, her computer-trouncing and missile-plotting The Invasion, and her total recall of the base layout in The Seeds of Death. And here, she gets to be terribly clever regarding their course and location. It’s a year into her tenure, and she’s still the usefully precocious genius. It’s admirable.
Even Hermack gets a good stroppy moment this week, when Major Warne asks to be rescued immediately and is met with a terse “Your request is noted...” before being left where he is! And thank God for Gostelow, who seems to ad-lib half his lines (he does one about Gruyere cheese which seems to genuinely throw Troughton and Hines). He has a refreshing unpredictability which is both believable and entertaining.
And this isn’t a complaint per se, but isn’t it strange that, just as I previously mentioned the threadbare contribution of the TARDIS crew up to this point, the space pirates seem to have taken a sabbatical also? Having been completely absent from episode two, it looks for a while like the titular bad guys aren’t going to bother to turn up this week either. If this were a Hartnell episode with its own title, they’d have called it Waiting For Caven.
May 2nd
The Space Pirates episode four
R: There’s some intelligence here – I love the way the Doctor surmises that there must be an exit from the pit, but because there’s fragile crockery down there. And there’s some decent comedy too – the Doctor’s fondness for drawing pins is rather sweet. But what appealed to me yesterday about the way the TARDIS crew are almost unaware of the main plot happening around them is now beginning to grate. When the main villain starts getting concerned about Clancey, you think, fair enough, he’s a guest star. When he starts giving attention to Sorba, who’s not even been in the story since episode one, you grit your teeth a bit, but put up with it. But when he still, two-thirds of the way through the story, hasn’t taken the slightest interest in the Doctor, it speaks volumes about the way this adventure has been structured.
And I can only imagine this must have been deliberate. We know from interviews and contemporary accounts that Troughton was unhappy with the series by this stage – hey, that’s why he was leaving, after all. One of the reasons was the heavy workload, and that’s why the episodes of The Mind Robber all ran so short: in a story that put so much emphasis upon the regulars, Troughton threatened to go on strike unless his lines were cut. You can well imagine by this stage that the production team asked Robert Holmes to sideline the TARDIS crew a bit, just to give Troughton something of a breathing space, and that he’s simply done the job too well. So now that Troughton is leaving the show, we’re in that frustrating position once again of seeing a Doctor bow out whilst barely being present within his own show any more. If what was done to Hartnell was insulting, though, here it’s merely a way of trying to keep Troughton appeased. It’s not as if we can lay the blame for the Doctor’s ineffectual appearance within the adventure squarely on Robert Holmes’ inexperience – as we’ve seen, whatever other problems it may have had, The Krotons highlighted Troughton perfectly.
So we’re in one of those situations that we don’t get again in Doctor Who until the days of David Tennant, where a story is constructed to give the lead actor a minor role. And so this week, the Doctor spends the episode trying to get out of a pit. Which rather says it all.
T: Whatever weaknesses Holmes has displayed here (and as you say, it’s not his fault if he was asked to sideline the star), he does have a grasp for making space-age names seem unusual without being naff. He doesn’t give us hoary old nonsense like Yartek, Zentos and Exorse or boring run-of-the-mill monikers like Hobson or Bennett. There’s an almost retro Olde Worlde aspect to his nomenclature... so we have talk of Dom Issigri, Hermack’s name is Nikolai (ahh, so maybe I wasn’t imagining the Russian accent), and a reluctant, snivelling lackey called Dervish (that’s positively Dickensian). I’m not sure about Caven being called “Maurice”, though. That must be up there with “Keith” and “Tim” for the Most Unthreatening Villainous Name of the Year Award.
Otherwise, this story’s attempts to underline the difficulties of space flight – complete with painstaking manoeuvres and lots of time spent in transit – would be laudable were it not for the fact that it’s, well, so deathly dull
. If really exciting things were happening to the Doctor, or if Caven was (I dunno) torturing a teddy bear, I could probably endure Penn’s lengthy navigation processes. But they’re not, so I can’t. Especially as this episode compounds the sin of consigning the Doctor to a boring cave by having him escape by rigging up a fatal (!) trap. Tomb nearly got away with a similar scenario because the Doctor was sealing away a potent threat to the universe. Here, he’s merely attempting to wriggle out of a comparatively minor jam. I know he only kills an extra – which at present is apparently no more heinous a crime than breaking a cup – but it does make me recall the brilliant bit in Clerks were they discuss the ramifications of the rebels killing all the freelance labourers working on the Death Star.
Let me close with a couple of positive notes. I’m pleased to see that Steve Peters gives a decent turn as the speaking pirate-guard – he clearly has more talent than his ability to fill a tall monster suit, so I’m glad he was given a slightly more rewarding role. And I do like the way Caven just starts blasting at the regulars – there’s no grandstanding, questions or opportunities to escape while he gloats. Just bang, bang, bang.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 70