The Smugglers
(Season 4, Dr 1 with Ben and Polly, 10/9/1966-1/10/1966, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, director: Julia Smith)
'Dead man's secret key
Ringwood, Smallbeer and Gurney
None of them remembered by history
A quest for pirate treasure gold
Just like in the fables of old
Even though the Doctor's never properly told
But why do pirates use such cryptic verse
When they hide their looted purse?
Especially when they come with a curse
Which end with bodies in quite a state
Those would follow pieces of eight
And even the Doctor soon forced to regenerate...
Ranking: 208
Have you ever worked at a job where there’s been a merger and everyone promises you everything is going to be exactly the same as before, but nobody coming in has the slightest clue how anything you’re doing works and they’re not interested in you when you try to explain how to do things the way you always did them? That’s ‘The Smugglers’, where new ideas are smuggled in masquerading as old ones, with everyone pretending things are just the same as always when they clearly aren’t. It must have been infuriating to existing fans of the show and no fan came bigger than William Hartnell. During the past year he’s seen companions disappear left right and centre (some of their own accord, some because the characters weren’t working, one because she complained too much) and seen various production members leave: Mervyn Pinfield the associate producer who had a firm hand on the tiller, Verity Lambert the producer who gave him his job and convinced him that he was right for the show and in David Whittaker the script editor who shaped the programme more than anyone. Now it’s being run by people who have been appointed to a job they’re not sure they want, who talk about things like ratings and demographics that nobody was too fussed about years ago, young men who to do things their way and who have inherited something they want to dismantle.
There are even two newbies around, arguably the first regulars who are very much doing Dr Who as a job to help their careers rather than a calling (they’ll both fall in love with the show in time – Michael Craze, Ben, will even have the Dr Who theme tune played at his funeral – but that’s not the case on story one). Hartnell is the last of the old guard left and while it’s still blurry when he was officially given his marching orders by his new boss Innes Lloyd, the likely answer is somewhere around filming this story. It must have been extraordinary lonely and heartbreaking for Hartnell to watch people who didn’t understand Dr Who (at least as it had existed until 1966) in charge of making it and telling him what to do, without listening to the one person who’d been there since the beginning and felt incredibly protective towards it. Change is inevitable and on Dr Who doubly so, as every new Doctor and production team makes clear – the show would simply not have survived had it stayed exactly the way it was at the beginning. However, nobody knew that in 1966 when the only TV programmes that lasted any length of time did so by offering very similar programmes across their run, like ‘Z Cars’ or ‘Dixon Of Dock Green’ or the soaps. Here it looks like sabotage at times as the usual things we get in Dr Who of this period that people had tuned in especially for are turned on their head with a story not quite drama, not quite comedy and certainly not scifi but a Boy’s own comic come to life. ‘The Smugglers’ is more ‘Moonfleet’ than ‘Moonbase’ and more ‘Doctor Syn’ than ‘Doctor Who’.
The result is a very odd story, quite unlike anything Dr Who had done before, but the oddness comes not because they make a big thing of the rule-breaking (as per ‘The Romans’ or ‘The Celestial Toymaker’) but because everyone is trying so very hard to pretend that nothing has changed, even when it’s obvious that it has. It’s a historical, as every other Dr Who story was back then, but one where the famous historical characters you might have heard of are mostly off screen and where everyone feels more like a storybook villain than people who actually existed once upon a time, with unlikely names like ‘Squire’ and ‘Cherub’ who, if they did exist, are lost to history. We’re deep in a world of pirates and ruffians and rogues, which is new in itself: traditionally historicals have given us either a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ group or more usually shown us why both lots can be viewed either way, both doing underhanded things as a result of having the best of intentions. Ironically, back in the days of monochrome, historicals were never that black-and-white, until now when practically everyone the Tardis travellers meet is a moustache-twirling unshaven villain. Had ‘The Smugglers’ been made when David Whittaker was script editor it would have been all about how there are people in every era you can and cannot trust, while in Dennis Spooner’s day we’d have had a beloved figure from history acting silly, being more like a fool in our time than a legendary hero. Newish script editor Gerry Davis has mostly been copying Dennis Spooner till now, but on this story has a new take on history: everyone is too wrapped up with their own little life to see the ‘bigger picture’. Usually in Who historicals the drama comes from being wrapped up in real events, of our friends being cut off from the Tardis and home. Generally even The Doctor, with all his knowledge and wisdom, isn’t big enough to fight back the sheer size of a country or a continent of humanity when they get an idea into their head while his companions struggle to keep afloat. Not here. This is a small-time story that involves a village not a whole country and a few rogues searching for loot rather than the whole of Western civilisation at stake. Though we’d had quest plots before (‘The Keys Of Marinus’) that one was for the freedom of a planet and the Tardis made under duress or to save people; this one’s a promise made to a dying man that everyone could easily have ignored or passed on to someone else. Instead of lectures about doing their best not to alter history everyone is in this plot up to their necks and nobody bats an eyelid, while unlike, say ‘The Aztecs’ or ‘The Crusade’ nobody at home is sure enough about this fictional quest for treasure to know how it will end. Nothing would really matter if The Doctor hadn’t landed in this story: nobody really learns anything (the Whittaker way) or learns that history repeats itself in cycles (the Spooner way). Instead The Doctor has a bit of fun doing a treasure hunt. More than anything else, it’s definitely not educational, the way the historical stories were originally envisioned (not unless you want to learn treasure clues in rhyme or the best place to stab people in the back anyway).Though arguably the best of the three actual pirate stories Dr Who has done over the years (not admittedly a great achievement when the others are ‘Curse Of the Black Spot’ and ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ the latter of which makes an even more ham-fisted version of telling what happened to Captain Avery’s gold, arrr!) it still somehow feels less plausible or possible than Douglas’ Adams wildly scifi take in ‘The Pirate Planet’.
Even the new companions,
Ben and Polly, aren’t behaving the way past companions have. They’re arguably
the first companions to be firmly rooted to their own time (the 1960s: though
Ian and Barbara came from 1963 they were the sort of timeless teachers you hope
were around in every era, while Dodo was a swinging sixties dollybird on paper
more than reality, while Susan Vicki and Steven were all from the future) and
bring that sense of 1960sism to every time period they enter. Ben’s reaction to
time travel is disbelief, but soon he’s arguing with pirates and fighting with
inn-keepers as if he’s been doing this all his life, comparing the people he
meets to those he’s met at sea. Polly finds the whole thing romantic, believes
the Doctor’s tales of time travel almost from the first and is happily making
up plans. Neither of them ‘need’ The Doctor in a way that even independent
characters like Steven and Ian once did, while you suspect that had they never
made it back to the Tardis both Ben and Polly would have carved out a perfectly
happy existence here in the 1680s. At the same time, though, neither tries to
blend in or change who they are – they do both dress up, but still look like 1960s
kids at a fancy dress ball (with Polly clearly still a girl rather than a boy,
unlike when Susan or Vicki had to do this sort of thing), while their dialogue
is pure 1960s hip kid speak. They don’t want to pretend to belong to this
world, they’re just visiting because London 1966 is the best place to be!
It’s more than that
though – it’s the ‘feel’ of this story that’s so different. Usually in 1960s Dr
Who the past feels very very real and very very scary and the whole point of
the story is how our friends are going to survive long enough to make it back
to the Tardis and sanctuary alive, if indeed they can at all. In this story
nobody seems to be in the slightest bit of danger. Which makes it sound as if
it’s all cosy, which it very much isn’t. In many ways it’s the most violent of
all the Hartnell stories (the only bits of this story that still exist on film
are the parts cut by Australian censors and there are a lot of them, from
pirates with blooded hands to knives in the back to swords being pulled out of
chests…and not treasure ones either!) and yet there never feels any question
that something bad might happen to someone it shouldn’t. Which is odd, because
writer Brian Hayles has clearly been taking his research not from historical
sources but books, works of literature from ‘Treasure Island’ to Enid Blyton’s
‘adventure’ stories (it would have been perfect if they’d got her nephew Carey
Blyton in to score this one, but no: in fact there’s no music at all – another
way this story is so different). In these by and large the danger is very much
what happens in Dr Who: the youngster at the heart of the story is taken from a
safe and ‘normal’ life, has to work out who to trust and how to survive by
their wits. They’re coming of age tales all, where the ‘real’ treasure isn’t
the treasure chests but surviving long enough to learn how to cope into
adulthood and to live long enough to see justice being meted out rather than
becoming a ‘victim’. In that sense it’s very much like past Dr Who historicals
of young(ish) characters being cut off from home and having to survive long
enough until it’s safe. Here everyone has a bit of fun with pirates and get to
go home in time for tea.
So why the change? Innes
Lloyd made no bones about the fact that there wasn’t a place for historicals in
his vision of the future for Dr Who, using the low appreciation index score for
‘The Gunfighters’ as an excuse
to get rid of them (though ‘The Savages’
was lower still and he kept the futuristic stories). For Lloyd audience numbers
and marketability was everything, which tended to mean monsters and planets
from the future. His model of science fiction was the slicker, more
Americanised version that was more about action than exploration. Indeed, his
dream was selling Dr Who to America, even accommodating a ‘false’ fade-to-black
in this and a few other stories, where the advertisement breaks would be ‘just
in case’. If he had to do historicals (and there’s only one more to go, with ‘The Highlanders’ very similar to
this one) then he wasn’t going to bore audiences with history lectures – he was
going to give Americans a view of ye olde worlde England (or, in ‘The
Highlanders’, ye olde worlde Scotland – sadly he stopped before we get ye olde
worlde Ireland or Wales) as it probably never was but everyone thinks it should
be. So ‘The Smugglers’ ends up a tale of swash-bucking sailors and buried
treasure, just like the works of literature the American audience might have
read, rather than the history books they almost certainly hadn’t. ‘The
Smugglers’ turns out very like ‘The Adventures Of Sir Lancelot’, the one big
success story of English TV over in America, with even the lower classes
talking with received pronunciation and an action scene every few minutes
whether the plot needs one or not (it’s where William Russell became a star a
decade before he was in Who). History is now meant to be ‘quaint’, not alien.
Just to add to emphasise
this we see more of England than ever before (or would if the story still
existed, beyond the odd recovered censor’s clip). Lloyd’s one great addition to
Who was the amount of location filming he brought to the series with this the
third story in a row to have an extensive amount of filming. In ‘The Savages’ it was our first quarry
pretending to be an alien planet while ‘The
War Machines’ was in firmly in the heart of London – neither were that far
from TV centre. ‘The Smugglers’ though has almost a full week of filming in
Cornwall. This marks the first time anyone from Dr Who had to stay in a hotel
rather than be close enough to drive back home/to rehearsals and is a bigger
change than you might think (being away from his beloved dressing room picnics
and sitting next to his younger Tardis crew members on a coach for hours seems
to have driven William Hartnell up the wall and not exactly endeared him to
Lloyd either). The hotel was in Penzance and there are/were lots of shots of
places there and nearby: Swanage, ‘Church Cove’ (Gunwalloe) where a couple of
poor stagehands had a rotten job taking the full size Tardis prop down a
slippery slope to a cave near the sea and ‘The Lizard’ (a peninsula on the
southern coast of Land’s End – it’s actually named ‘Lys Ardh, old English for
‘high court’, but as lots of lizards did live there the new name kinda stuck).
The film crew even commandeered a fishing vessel as sail boat ‘The Black
Albatross’, fixing it up with extra fake sails and rigging (well, on half the
boat anyway: clever camera angles masked that only half the boat had been
altered). Alas we can’t see it, but the still photographs, people’s memories
and a brief bit of home footage from director Julia Smith included on the ‘Lost
In Time’ DVD (chosen for the job specially as she knew the local area well
after her work nearby with another ‘doctor’ – ‘Dr Finley’s Casebook’ – I’m
guessing the bit we see here is the ‘stone barn’ the production team turned
into a 17th century inn) suggest whatever it sounded like ‘The
Smugglers’ looked gorgeous. The costumes and sets are every bit as brilliant as
you’d expect from a BBC history project too. At times in the ‘Loose Canon’
reproduction it looks more like an advert on behalf of the British tourist
board than Dr Who. If any substantial part of this story is ever returned to
the archives I suspect it will be a lot better remembered than it is now from
the half-hearted novelisation or the TV soundtrack, given how so much of it is
action rather than dialogue based and while it’s not first in my queue of
stories I’m desperate to be recovered it is one that really needs to be seen,
not just heard. Then again, there was also something ‘right’ about hearing a tale
of bootleggers on a blurry bootlegged cassette: somehow every time I see an
improved cleaned-up version of this story it gets worse, as if all the mystery
has been taken away (perhaps it’s a Brian Hayles thing? I felt the same about ‘The Celestial Toymaker’).
Only William Hartnell
makes this seem like it’s Dr Who at all and he’s magnificent here in difficult
circumstances (for everyone else the location filming was a welcome break, but
the coach journey and seasickness on top of his arteriosclerosis must have made
for heavy going). Given that this was the last run of the longest season Dr Who
had ever had (though held back to kickstart the fourth) and Hartnell had only
had one half-break recently (watching Frederick Jaeger have all his lines while
going ugh’ in ‘The Savages’ episode three) he’s sensational, fully in command
of both the cameras and the situation and alternating between those moments of
kindness and grumpiness for which he’s remembered. Some recent stories have
clearly been a struggle for him (Hartnell’s not been quite right since ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’) but here
he’s brilliant, with no real signs of the illness that was the excuse for
pushing him out of his job. So it’s all the more shocking that this is his
‘last hurrah’, with Lloyd deciding to replace him during the summer break (officially
he’s contracted as a ‘guest artists’ for ‘The
Tenth Planet’. Even before he collapses in that story it’s hard to believe
it’s the same actor as Hartnell struggles with his lines and has problems standing
up never dominating the camera, the one time he really was as feeble as legend
always has it (but then he had effectively been fired from his job which can’t
have helped his health; his treatment at the hands of this production team is
truly shocking).
His acting alone lifts
this story several places higher than it would otherwise be, but Ben and Polly
too make a more than convincing debut, breezing their way in a very 1960s way
that brings a bit of Swinging London even to 17th century Cornwall. They’re
good ‘fun’ in a way the series had never had before, friends you want to have
fun with rather than elder (or younger) siblings or adult figures. Michael
Craze makes Ben feisty and brave, holding his own as a moral compass in a
crooked world. One could uncharitably say they make his character ‘thick’ in
later stories and have him the butt of the jokes as he’s gullible and easily
brainwashed in stories like ‘The Macra
Terror’, but not here: Ben is a reliable fixed point in s story where
everyone else is up to something. Even Polly at times, who gets caught up in
events and lets her imagination run away with her, to her detriment (when she
understandably panics) but also as her strength (she comes up with the plan of
appealing to the locals’ superstitious natures, not The Doctor for once and it
won’t be her last plan to get out of trouble by any means – funnily enough it’s
the same one The Doctor himself used in ‘An
Unearthly Child’). In a sign of things to come Polly is the cool-headed,
calm one when it comes to people, whom Ben doesn’t fully understand at all, but
she goes to pieces when she sees something ‘other’ (in this case a rat) while
Ben’s pretty good at fighting monsters and vermin. They make a great
double-act: Ben is a no nonsense working lad and Polly a posh secretary clearly
made for more gentile surroundings but between them you know they’re going to
do the right thing and will never ever leave the other behind. After Steven’s
character fell off a cliff and Dodo was a non-starter they’re a breath of fresh
air, three-dimensional characters again (at least for now) and easily the beast
of Lloyd’s many changes. Indeed even though they left two and one stories ago
respectively, it’s hard to imagine what this story would be like with Steven
and Dodo in it: Steven would have got everyone’s backs up and Dodo would have
got herself killed doing something stupid, but Ben and Polly have a nous we
haven’t seen in the show’s humans since the schoolteachers left. Even though
neither of them acts the way anyone ‘normal’ would at any time: being taken out
of time, being locked up and attacked by pirates is the sort of thing that used
to make even veterans like Ian and Barbara panic, but not here; they both take
it all in their stride, past ten minutes of calling the Doctor a liar in
episode one. Incidentally Polly is the only female character the entire story.
This is, I believe, the closest Dr Who comes to an all-male cast until the
obvious exception of ‘Heaven Sent’
in 2015 (which is basically Peter Capaldi talking to himself), even though it
was made by only Who’s second ever female director, Julia Smith (beating the
first female Doctor and the first female writer by quote some margin, though
the series of course started with a female producer).
Ben, especially, shines
here as a character who’s ‘good’ and straightforward in a world that very much
isn’t and where everyone is trying to ‘smuggle’ something past someone, whether
it be their true character or rum, brandy, tobacco and silks. The local inn is
really a front for smuggling and even though the Squire talks every so posh and
regal he’s in it up to his neck. This is the sort of place where even the inn
and church have secret passages that lead to the cove for a bit of smuggling.
Pike is far from being a ‘stupid boy’ – he’s a ruthless murderer, but you don’t
know that one first meeting. He hates being called and lumped in with the
others when he thinks he’s so posh, but that’s all he is (sample line that
rather sums him up: ‘One more word out of you and I’ll split your gizzard! Now
let’s talk like gentlemen…’) There’s a man named ‘Cherub’. Sounds like the sort
of man you’d like to bring homer to mother, right? Wrong! He kills you as soon
as look at you. Even The Doctor isn’t quite straightforward, doing his usual
thing of going ‘undercover’ as fortune teller and the medical type of ‘Doctor’,
not correcting anyone when they mistake him for someone else. Even his reaction
to Ben and Polly isn’t ‘this is what you’ve let yourself in for’ so much as
stringing them along and laughing when they talk about taking the train home
(just compare to the way he kidnaps Ian and Barbara: kidnapping isn’t the
lesser of two evils but a bit of fun). Pike talks about ‘the foolishness of an
honest man’ but it’s the people playing ‘games’ with the truth and the treasure
who come a cropper in one of Dr Who’s most moral stories (arguably even The
Doctor doesn’t get away scot free given he regenerates next time out).
There’s an interesting
subplot of fate too, sort of like a ‘17th century ‘Broadchurch’ about
being careful which authority figures you trust (with a grumpy Hartnell
standing in for a grumpy Tennant, Polly as Oliva Colman and Ben as Jodie
Whittaker). The Doctor happily dismisses all the superstitions he sees (and
which allows Polly to give them the idea to escape prison) but he points out at
the end that, even though he was faking it, all his fortunes came true. This
is, indeed, the only time The Doctor ever does a tarot reading himself (and
tarot won’t be seen on screen again until ‘Turn
Left’): in case you’re wondering Hayles’ script identifies each card with a
different character – Kewper is the Jack of Clubs, Blake the Jack of Diamonds, Cherub
the King of Spades, Pike the King of Spades (sadly the Doctor doesn’t pick one
for himself but he’s surely ‘The Hierophant’ and the Tardis ‘The Chariot’, with
Ben ‘Temperance’ and Polly the ‘Queen of Hearts’. Most of all, it’s a story
about how being rich isn’t worth anything if you haven’t learned wisdom to go
alongside it, that money won’t change who you are or w your worst qualities,
only amplify them. Surprisingly, it’s the first Dr Who
story driven by money specifically. It’s safe to say that, the unfortunate
ending of ‘Kerblam!’ aside, Dr Who
has always had a healthy scepticism of capitalism and that’s true here too. We’ve
had trade deals gone wrong (Sensorites),
gifts for Kubla Kahn (‘Marco Polo’) and
pesticides cutting corners (‘Planet Of
Giants’) but this is first where it’s purely for the gold and given how
many characters die in pursuit of it, clearly it’s bad for you. Though no mention is made of it, storing illegal gotten
gains in a church of all things is surely against some religious ideal
somewhere too – the men who planted it there and the men who try to take it for
their own greed all die. Not every superstition is ‘wrong’ then and not
everyone who believes in them a fool. The closest ‘The Smugglers’ ever gets to
a moral message! Although in another this story is more like ‘The Five Doctors’ than it’s ever given
credit for: the baddies all die seeking the treasure for the ‘wrong’ reasons
rather than get stuck on the side of Rassilon’s tomb, but basically it boils
down to the same thing. Are you on a quest for the right reasons? Or are you
the person the treasure curse was made to protect it from?
‘The Smugglers’ is a good
little story then, with a lot of action and some fun lines, most of them either
at the expense of Ben and Polly or the locals not quite comprehending the way the
others live their lives. Unlike one or two of the wordier, worthier monochrome
stories this one is never boring and cracks along at a pace that would wind
some modern Whos. The location filming looks gorgeous, especially when The Tardis
does what we’ve never seen it do before and lands on a beach, a rigid box of
certainty fighting against the tide. There’s a colourful cast of characters,
more fight scenes than you can shake a pegleg at and some memorable
performances that just stop themselves going all the way to hammy. Special
praise should go to Paul Whitsun Jones’ Squire, who manages to find the thin
line between ‘posh’ and ‘pirate’, John Ringham who makes Blake a very different
and very English type of villain compared to his Aztec Tloxtoxl, Michael
Godfrey playing the part of ‘Pike’ while holding one in his shirt-sleeves, Jack
Bligh’s brief appearance as ‘Gaptooth’ (with a birthdate of 1889 he’s the
earliest-born actor to ever have a speaking part in Dr Who!) and Elroy Joseph,
who puts up with some very stereotypical lines as Jamaica, the first black
actor ever seen in the series (though he’s the one ‘nice’, or at least ‘neutral’,
character to die a horrid death. Could
have been worse though: in the first draft he was ‘Crow’ as in ‘Jim Crow’,
while almost any other 1960s drama series would have had him the outright villain,
not the doubting henchman). It’s impossible to spot him without moving footage
and he’s not in any stills I’ve ever seen, but apparently that’s Hugh Fraser
doing his first TV work as an extra, roughly thirty years before he’s Poirot’s
right-hand man Hastings (he’ll never be in Dr Who again on TV but he’s done
lots of Big Finishes). From what we can see Julia Smith’s direction was pretty
darn good, with some of the biggest scenes of extras in the series yet (mostly
sea cadets and curious passers-by). It’s all a very watchable (well,
listenable) ninety minutes where nothing goes badly wrong. Unfortunately that’s
all it is.
Fans from later years,
especially the 1970s, tend to ‘get’ this story more and see it as a first
stepping stone towards what becomes ‘normal’ Who: there’s an early appearance
by stuntmen HAVOC in all but name (with Derek ware making the first of many
death-defying stunts), while the source-recycling is just like the Hinchcliffe
years. For those of us who love our 1960s Who, though, it’s a colossal backward
step from the mystery, intrigue, suspense and imagination of before, with Dr
Who going from a series where anything could happen to one that finds new ways
of repeating the same formulas slightly differently. Even the greatest ‘Smugglers’
fan has to admit there’s something lacking compared to the many great Dr Who
historicals of the past when the stakes were high, the quality was higher and
the plot actually made sense. What with the setting and the fact it came at the
end of one of Dr Who’s most gruelling filming schedules, it almost feels like
the programme is on holiday at times and out to have fun rather than make great
television. Pirates doing piratey things simply aren’t as interesting as Kings
suffering mental anguish, Aztecs questioning their superstitions or even
cavemen learning how to be civilised to one another. You can tell that Hayles
is writing this story, so alien to his natural abilities, under duress because
Innes Lloyd asked him to: his natural feel is for more three-dimensional
characters and stories, where no one is the villain (but in a way ‘we all are’).
You would never guess from this bit of workmanlike copying that he was the
imaginative creator or ‘The Celestial
Toymaster’ or the moral debater behind the ‘Peladon’ stories, while the
closest we get to The Ice Warriors is a lot of extra going ‘brrr!’ because we’re
filming in Cornwall in June, and Hayles always considered it his least
favourite of his six Who stories. Sometimes writers aren’t the best judges of
their own work, but in this case he’s spot on: it’s not that this story is ‘bad’
(not in a way that even parts of ‘Toymaker’ is bad), just bland. Worst of all
Dr Who is no longer offering something unique: bar the fact we know they come
from ‘the future’ there’s nothing science-fictiony in any of this. Frankly most
drama adaptations of piratical novels do this sort of thing better too: there’s
no great sense of drama, of scale, of loss, of desperation, of motivation, just
cut-throat people doing cut-throat things because that’s who they are. Even the
‘treasure hunt’ aspect doesn’t work, at least for ‘us’ at home joining in: the
clues would be way too hard to follow, even if the actors had said the lines
properly (and it’s not Hartnell who gets it wrong either for once but Terence De Marney’s Longfoot!) –how are we
meant to know they’re the surnames from graves when we haven’t seen a graveyard
till episode four? While who’s ever heard of the surname ‘Smallbeer’? - while the
treasure itself is…a string of pearls. Not exactly the key to time is it? It’s
a bit of muddle what happens to the treasure in the end anyway, with Blake and
Pike fighting each other for it when the militia turn up. Did The Doctor even
do right by Longfoot, who entrusted him with the clue with his dying breath?
Dr Who stories are really
about people going on a journey of discovery, be they in past present or
future, but perhaps the biggest shame is that nothing really changes here by
the time the Tardis leaves except that some guys got richer and have a tale to
tell in the public house about some strangers they met in funny clothes. ‘The
Gunfighters’ and ‘The Romans’ tend to get all the flak for how bad the Hartnell
historicals could be, but they’re masterpieces compared to this story, ones
with actual characterisations and depth, at least in bits. ‘The Smugglers’ is
just lazy writing. Admittedly they liven it up by making it a great looking and
well made
bit of telly, but it’s easily the emptiest and silliest of all the Hartnell stories
and sets an unfortunate precedent for some of the early Troughtons to come. While
admittedly the ratings were in a slump anyway the public seemed to particularly
hate this one, with a new low average of 4.48million per episode (the lowest
average until as late as ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’ twenty years later). Clearly
something has to change, but smuggling in so many new ideas inside old ones isn’t
clicking with the public – it’s going to take the radical change of ‘The Tenth Planet’ for Dr Who to find
its feet once more and the series will do so only by losing the greatest thing
here, it’s lead star. Not so much ‘pieces of eight’ as a sort of ‘mediocre five’.
POSITIVES + Ben is a
companion that was badly under-served in Who (not least when Jamie comes along
and gets half of his lines) so it’s good to see a story that gives him so much
to do. Ben’s a 1960s sailor, which means he’s respectful of authority but in a
very sixties way, only when it’s earned and not just given to everyone. The
contrast here between frightened cabin boys and people out to do anything for
treasure puts into stark relief how much of a moral compass he is, brave enough
to say yes to the right people and brave enough to say no to the wrong people
too (and enough of a fighter to take on two separate bloodthirsty pirates).
Michael Craze is great here too, an action hero in a very different, reluctant,
survivalist way to Ian or Steven who never gets a hair out of place while
roughing people up (on the telesnaps anyway) and who spends most of this story
being the practical one who wants to leave while the others push to explore,
always believable, always real. He copes well considering he hurt himself badly
early during filming, but carried on (he fell through a trapdoor: not the last
accident Michael will have on set). Alas without the nautical setting most
future writers will end up more interested in writing for Polly and all the
promise in Ben seen here gets left behind.
Previous ‘The War Machines’ next ’The Tenth Planet’
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