Doctor Who: The Space Pirates (1969)

Only the second episode of this survives on video, and it's not very interesting: a long scene on a spaceship with a lawman (Jack May) grilling an overplayed old prospector (Gordon Gostelow) while the Doctor and companions are stuck on a chunk of a broken-up satellite well away from the 'action'. The audio suggests the whole thing wasn't much better - my strongest memory of seeing the thing go out in 1969 is the Magneto-like helmet worn by sneery space pirate Dudley Foster (a frequent TV baddie of the era). It's a type of story done surprisingly rarely on Doctor Who, though the commonplace of much s-f TV - space opera without aliens, relocating earthbound genre conventions (western, as much as piratical) in space.

The plot revolves around argonite (one of the series' many made-up useful elements) as May, representing a new police force in this formerly lawless area, thinks disreputable old Gostelow is behind piratical attacks on ore freighters though it's actually the smooth, wealthy daughter (Lisa Daniely) of an old partner (Esmond Knight) Gostelow is suspected of having murdered. The old man turns up alive, imprisoned by Foster, and Daniely draws the line (a bit late) at wholesale murder to side with the goodies.

Made towards the end of Troughton's day, it's a hasty Robert Holmes script with a plot that could easily tick over without the regulars showing up at all. At six episodes, it's protracted - a spacefaring epic which still has endless scenes of people standing around plotting or haggling. There ought to be more mileage in having the Doctor show up in the middle of a conventional s-f story (a la Moon Zero Two) and making fun of it, but he's subdued – though Troughton does have his single best non sequitur line-reading, at once shy, sly, defensive, devious and boyish ('I like drawing pins'). A nice choral score conveys the vasty deeps of space.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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