The Space Pirates: Ranking - 212

 The Space Pirates

(Season 6, Dr 2 with Jamie and Zoe, 8/3/1969-12/4/199, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Derrick Sherwin, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Michael Hart) 

'Today's guest blog is from Milo Clancey from the future: 'New fangled rubbishy blogspot 2050, it's not like it was in my day when Elon Musk ran twitter and Nick Clegg ran meta-facebookwhatsis and tiktok was something new. They were proper social media outlets they were, not like today's mergers tikbooks and yahoofaces and instatwit no sirree. That there 90th anniversary Dr Who special didn't live up to the 60th either I can tell you. Fancy reviving Yartek the leader of the alien Voord and having him be played by a regenerated David Tennant, I ask you. All them corporations makes it mighty hard to be a freelance writer and keep hold of your opinions so it does. Now everybody's got their own sponsor for their social media outlays and here's mine: the latest solar-powered toaster cooks your bread even when it's raining, which is most of the time. It's the best thing since sliced bread, or at any rate my lunar-powered bread slicer it says here. Well that don't take the gosh darn biscuit!'  

Ranking: 212

 

 

Usually ‘missing’ stories in Dr Who, especially ones with a single complete episode in existence to give us a tantalising glimpse of what might be, have a special place within fandom. It’s the unknown you see: no matter if you’ve read the novels in paperback and hardback, can quote every word from the soundtrack and have studied every telesnap photo taken off the TV there will always be part of the story that comes as a complete surprise when one is lucky enough to be re-discovered more or less complete. The direction might be more ambitious, the acting subtler, the music more mysterious, the props more impressive, than anything that appeared in print or in photographs. Hopes are high for stories that are only a bit missing yet leave a lot of room for hope of perfection, especially for ‘important’ stories. ‘The Space Pirates’ ought to be such a tale. It’s the penultimate Troughton adventure and so our last goodbye that doesn’t involve being on the run from soldiers for both him and for the much loved Tardis team of Jamie and Zoe. It’s the second story from prolific and beloved writer Robert Holmes and what’s more the first specially written for Dr Who rather than re-hashed from another series. It’s the first time Dr Who does ‘space opera’, something it will really get into during the 1970s, seeing what happens in the days between Mankind landing on the moon and the Human empires of the future decaying and crumbling.

Most fans, however, are disappointed in ‘The Space Pirates’, not least because the one surviving episode is particularly slow and weak.  The Doctor and co are barely in it, while our friends are far from their usual selves: Jamie spends most of it asleep a far cry from the active self of his younger days, Zoe alternates between being annoyingly clever and stupidly thick (infamously she has to have the concept of candles explained to her, even though she knew perfectly well in ‘The Mind Robber’ a few stories earlier) and The Doctor keeps making mistakes: this story would have been cleared up much earlier had he not reversed the polarity of the neutron flow and got a simple (albeit huge) magnet round the ‘wrong’ way, while also getting everyone lost in the tunnels (it’s my guess both these parts are where Holmes artificially extended this story to make it longer, by an episode or so each as we don’t really need two or four for the plot). It’s as if all three are extras in their own story. The title sounds a lot more exciting than anything we actually get (these are ‘space smugglers’ really and don’t walk around with parrots or eye-patches sadly but generic ‘space’ clothes) . That’s enough to damn ‘Space Pirates’ as the perhaps the one missing story not many fans want to see, with less scope for hope and imagination than usual. ‘Space Pirates’ is, regrettably, a bad Dr Who story and would remain so whether all of it existed or none of it did, far from the penultimate hurrah we wanted. The regulars get very little to do – they don’t appear until fourteen whole minutes into the story and, due to location filming for the big goodbye to come weren’t around for the recording for the last episode at all except a few pre-filmed sequences. Mostly they’re surviving, not saving the universe, caught up in a story that’s not of their making and which owes more to Westerns than science fiction, with a dispute over a claim for the universe’s most valuable element ‘argonite’ and space rockets in place of horses and carts. It’s a small-stakes story, even if the backdrop to it is big, with no bigger motive than getting the Tardis back after it’s been stranded on a disintegrated beacon out in space. The best thing about this era if the 2^nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe partnership but they’re extras in their own story at best.

However, view it as a bit of standalone scifi from the era as an episode from, say, ‘Out Of The Unknown’ with guest roles for the Doctor and I still say it’s a good little story (if a bit overlong). A lot of fans find the continual comparisons between Wild West cowboys and space explorers grating – certainly it was done far more subtly in early Star Trek (and that’s not a sentence I’ll be writing often. Maybe the series felt a bit of competition what with Trek being broadcast on UK TV for the first time in the Dr Who slot when ‘The War Games’ ends. Certainly what’s what Dudley Simpson seems to be thinking with his score, the only one to feature a female voice prominently, just like Trek).The biggest problem with ‘The Space Pirates’ by far is that, even though he’ll go on to create more things we think of as ‘Dr Who’ than anyone Robert Holmes hasn’t actually seen much Dr Who yet and no one is around to help him. He was hired to do this story by new script editor Terrance Dicks in something of a hurry after a number of backstage problems during the making of season six whereby at least twenty episode’s worth of stories fell apart at the last minute (the one that should have been in the Space Pirates slot was ‘The Dream Spinners’ by Paul Wheeler, an abstract script that reads like ‘The Dreamstone’ animation from the 1990s, a planet full of people who create good dreams for aliens who don’t realise they’re fictional that just wasn’t visual enough to work on TV. I wish they’d do it as a Big Finish audio in the ‘Lost Stories’ range though, it has potential. Another was Holmes’ first idea, ‘Aliens In The Blood’ about an alien bacteria that made Humans go a bit doolally, rejected for being a bit too close to Amnerican series ‘The Invaders’ but later made for BBC radio as ‘The Alien Mind’, one of Holmes’ first jobs after leaving the series in 1976). Something the production office tended to do in those days was keep a story back in reserve as a ‘maybe’ if they had no other choice and one of these, Holmes’ unsolicited script for ‘Out Of the Unknown’ that had been passed to the Dr Who production office ‘The Krotons’, had got them out of a hole with Holmes doing something almost no other writer had done in the history of the series: shock horror, he’d actually made a deadline with his re-writes! With so many other stories falling apart he was an obvious candidate to ask back again, just two stories later. We know that ‘The Space Pirates’ must have been written in a hurry because Holmes didn’t expect to work on the series again when he was writing that adventure and there’s only a six week buffer since ‘The Krotons’. We also know he was asked to write a four part story, before panic backstage meant ‘The Space Pirates’ got extended by another two at the absolute last moment (so the slowness and padding isn’t necessarily Holmes’ fault). Holmes, who had only seen his one story, hadn’t got a clue how to write for Dr Who  and Terrance Dicks, busy on the finale, hadn’t got time to script edit it for him. Instead that job fell to Dereck Sherwin, outgoing producer, who was filling the sudden vacancy left by Peter Bryant (who’d been moved to a forgotten series named ‘Spair’, which is sort of NCIS but for the Air Force): it’s a sign of how little faith that anyone at the BBC had that Dr Who would continue that there wasn’t yet a full time replacement. So that’s a writer who doesn’t know the show, writing for a substitute script editor who thought he’d left the job once and wanted to move on to other things, and a main script editor who’s only been on the job a matter of weeks himself and from episode two onwards, filmed in a whole new studio at TV centre with episode one a fond farewell to the show’s most common home at Lime Grove (there’s also a floor manager who’s never worked on the series before too but boy will he dominate it in years to come: future producer John Nathan-Turner). Throw in a director who’s never worked on the series either (Michael Hart, brother of artist-presenter Tony) and it’s a wonder it isn’t worse.

As ever with Holmes, though, he’s great at worldbuilding and characters especially the idea of a whole new metal that’s transformed our future and made ‘our’ era’s buildings obsolete and the oldies here nostalgic for it (yes, even concrete). Time has moved on and people now fight over aragonite the way they used to over gold, because it’s so darned useful (so useful it’s a surprise it isn’t in more stories, but then everyone always forgets about ‘The Space Pirates’). There’s a nice lot of both here, all of which would have made slightly more sense to viewers in 1969 than it does today. My guess is that Holmes properly studied the Dr Who story that was on after his own episodes (Brian Hayles’ ‘The Seeds Of Death’) as a representation of what the series was ‘about’ and came to his own conclusions about the future of space travel at a time when NASA were gearing up to land on the moon (Apollo 9, the one that was a sort odf ‘dress rehearsal’ by going into orbit round Earth for days, took place in the gap between episodes one and two). ‘Seeds’ imagines a future when rockets are out of date and stuck in Museums, the technology of the 1960s kids old hat as the whippersnapper technology of their grandchildren, T-mat, takes the world by storm. Hayles, though, has a soft spot for rockets and they’re the heroes in a story all about keeping old technologies in case you need them one day. Holmes, though, fills in the gap on what would happen in the future if rockets really were everyday transport and sees mankind as repeating all the same problems we did on this planet, with individual entrepreneurs clashing with oppressive police regimes (General Hermick and his men are the human equivalent of the Judoon. And if you think Holmes would never be that rude, he sent in his script for ‘The Krotons’ because he so hated his day job. As a policeman. He’ll have the force made out of plastic in his next story ‘Spearhead From Space’ too). There are conmen and kidnappers around too, the same as there are now, even if they hide out on planets rather than ghost towns. Where Hayles sees technology repeating themselves in cycles Holmes sees mankind going round and round and making the same mistakes, which is an idea subtly different enough to work.
Like Hayles, too, he’s ending the 1960s with a story that, probably more by accident than design, picks up on the big question asked in Dr Who most of the decade: what sort of a future are the children of today going to have? A world war is overdue and the teenagers are refusing to fight. What will they do in the 1970s when they become adults? For Hayles the kids of the day all became like their grandparents, replaced by younger technology, but for Holmes it’s more complex than that. Rather than a mass group who all think the same he separates them into three groups: the unthinking kids join the ‘man’ signified by the police force, the shady ones become pirates hijacking space shuttles for a living and the best ones stay truer to themselves.

 Milo Clancey is a great character, a true eccentric drifting about through space in his own broken down vessel the ‘Liz79’(‘Longrange Investigation Z79’), which has as much character as he does. The hint is that he’s really rich (he co-mined the universe’s richest seam of aragonite after all) but he chooses to run around in a broken down rocket by choice because that way he’s free, living the hippie dream into old age. Milo Clancey is potentially a child at the time of transmission (there isn’t an on-screen date given), but here the old hand who considers what must have seemed like the stuff of tomorrow to first-time viewers as old, safe and cosy (‘Rubbishy new-fangled solar space toasters’ is a quote I find myself using a surprising amount in real life),  He refuses modern technology, refuses to get a proper job, refuses to be what everyone else wants him to be, travelling around in a ricketty old ship. He’s actually more like The Doctor in this story than The Doctor is (Patrick Troughton actually putting a complaint in over how he and the regulars are handled in this story, by a writer who just doesn’t know them). He’s one of my favourite characters in the Whoniverse.

Unfortunately it’s a sign of how much of a hurry this story was made that he’s only one of my favourite characters in the book (the last of Terrance Dicks’ whopping sixty-four novelisations and left until right at the end in 1990 because no one else wanted to do this story): in the audios and TV reconstructions he’s a pain in the neck. Actor Gordon Gostelow rewrote a lot of the dialogue to make it ‘funnier’ (it isn’t) and, picking up on the Western theme, gives Clancey a faux American accent that turns a quite serious character into comedy relief, making Clancey fake where his whole persona is about being ‘real’. This is a particular problem today when sound is most of what’s left, or if you come to this story after hearing it and you read the novel in his accent and end up speaking like that automatically for days. The pirates, too, talk as if they’re in a bad English film about Americans (far worse than the ones in ‘The Gunfighters’ and they were pretty bad) while the actors playing the police send up their status as ‘comedy’ goons rather than the senseless jobsworth bureaucrats Holmes probably intended (given all his future Who stories where he had more input and clout to get them ‘right’; you wouldn’t know from this that General Hermick was played by the excellent Jack May roughly twenty years before he plays Igor in ‘Count Duckula’). Caven is the sort of boring one dimensional ‘pirate’ who makes the ones in ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ look good. Then there’s Madeleine Issigri, the character around whom the plot revolves, who goes through hell in this story: she’s inherited a business she doesn’t know how to run from her dad who is presumed dad and thinks Clancey is out to hurt her business; what she doesn’t know is that the ‘pirate’ businessmen who seem to be her friends are behind it all and are keeping her dad prisoner, hoping for her company to unravel. She has every right to be amongst the crossest rootenest tootenest distraught characters we see in the series, but they dress her up in a metal outfit (complete with metal hairdo) and actress Lisa Danely decides to play her as a calculating robot instead. Which is odd because Milo for one is still dressed as if he’sin a 19^th century Goldrush. No one seems to understand this story or what it’s really about, from the director to the cast to the costume designers to the absent script editor and rather than make the most out of ‘The Space Pirates’ we get the worst possible version of it.

I wonder, too, if there isn’t something of the Antarctic geophysical year 1957-58)  about this story.  The last unpopulated land mass on Earth every country seems to be staking a claim to part of it in the 1960s, sending just enough scientists to it to benefit from the research and materials there. It was the 20^th century equivalent of the Goldrush, with plenty of comments about how man hadn’t changed since a century earlier. By 1969 though there’s been a concerted attempt to co-ordinate everything, to make the Antarctic a ‘shared’ land with access to all the main players and no country turned away (even if the biggest ones nabbed all the best research posts and existing buildings).  This was the Dr Who utopian vision of the future, more or less and basically what we see in ‘Seeds Of Death’. But Holmes is busy thinking about a century ahead as well as behind when the fuss over ownership happens all over again in space and this is the inevitable stage before that, when everyone is squabbling with everyone else. This story feels like the disputed claims over the Antarctic from the first half of the 20^th century, when people scarp over a place that’s largely uninhabitable anyway eager to be the first people to stake a claim to it (Holmes isn’t wrong if the fight over the ‘dot.com’ boom in the 1990s is anything to go by though maybe a bit optimistic about the space travel).  

Mostly, though, this is written as a Western pure and simple. Every stereotype is here – the lawman, the eccentric miner, the female businesswoman in over her head, the sheriff, the outlaws: this is effectively an episode of ‘Alias John Smith and Jones’, right down to half the costumes. Which is a problem because the two genres don’t really mix. ‘The Gunfighters’ just about got away with it by having the Tardis land in the ‘real’ past (though a lot of fans don’t like it partly because it’s such an obviously fictional version of that past) but ‘The Space Pirates’ fairly groans at the seams with all the metaphors and comparisons. The future never replicates the past quite this much and there’s a world of difference between the sort of small stakes Western plot (will our hero be rich or robbed?) and science fiction (which, more often than not, concerns everybody). Everyone is a walking cliché, without any depth to them except Clancey and even he skirts dangerously closet o being a caricature at times. Our regulars aren’t in this story much anyway but even when they are they feel out of place because they’re three-dimensional people we know well. It’s all a bit odd, closer to the TV Comic versions of Dr Who than the TV versions (maybe Holmes read those too?) It made some sort of sense in the 1960s when Westerns were everywhere and Dr Who was at least in part the sort of series that ‘channel hopped’, throwing The Doctor and co at other programmes, but of all the 1960s stories it probably makes least sense to us today now the peculiar format of Westerns isn’t so common and Dr Who doesn’t do this sort of thing anymore. It’s also a pretty boring Western – the most interesting ones have American Indians defending their homeland against invading cowboys and there’s none of that here (indeed, I’m not the first reviewer to add that an invading monster, perhaps in place of the pirates who aren’t really pirates, would have livened this story up no end. To be fair to Holmes he probably thought the same and it’s not his fault he was asked to keep costs to a minimum and under strict instructions not to have an alien race here at all). 

Modern audiences don’t know what to make of it all, but there’s an obvious thing that people watching the reconstructions today miss: it’s not about the travelling, it’s all about the waiting. Back in 1969 instantly materialising Tardises were old hat: what was really exciting was watching multiple hours of coverage for a glimpse of a rocket slowly moving across the sky to the moon. Mankind was poised on a precipice, edging ever closer to our first tentative steps into space, but to do so meant being patient. Every coverage of every space expedition (and they were exciting enough to get multiple hours and big audiences in 1969) meant lots of long hours of being told what was going to happen in infinite detail, then seeing it happen for seconds, then hours of explaining what happened. Watch any real footage of space exploration from the period and what strikes you isn’t how amazing anything is in one burst but how amazing it is that something so life-changing happens so quickly after 3,4 or more hours of waiting for it and that most of what happens is caused not by direct action but endless shots of scientists twiddling buttons and blurry indistinct shapes moving on the monitor) Shockingly a lot of the coverage of the real moon landings from three-four months after this story went out has been wiped (a crime on par with wiping Dr Who!) but what does exist seems very like ‘The Space Pirates’ – a slow build across hours while pieces fall into place with such slow imperceptible moments between scenes you can fall asleep and miss whole episodes and still find not much has happened at all. I bought the excellent DVD ‘The Apollo Moon Landing’ in 2019 with all the surviving British TV coverage of the moon landing, complete with supporting documentaries from Patrick ‘Eleventh Hour’ Moore and others and it’s a very different experience than documentaries made today in retrospect. The outcome is far from certain and everyone is aware that things can go wrong at any time, so rather than announcers speaking over everything and explaining (that’s kept for separate programmes): instead everyone is holding their collective breath as space rockets move infinitesimally slowly across the screen. That’s what ‘The Space Pirates’ is trying to recapture: that sense of space being big and vast and scary, rather than something the Tardis can come and go through in seconds, full of jeopardy and trouble. On the plus side it means that we gets a realistic portrayal of what space travel would really be like in a Dr Who version of the future where everyone travels in rockets like cars, with journeys taking days rather than the minutes they do elsewhere, especially in ‘The Seeds Of Death’ with it’s T-mat machine (as Douglas Adams once said, you might think it’s a long way to the shops but that’s peanuts compared to space. Sometimes I rather like that, especially in context between an action-packed Ice Warrior invasion and a ten part epic that keeps upping the tempo.On the downside it means that everything takes an extra long time, with not much happening in between. ‘The Space Pirates’ is, alas, one of the slowest and most boring Dr Who stories ever. What’s forgotten to modern audiences is that this isn’t a mistake or a byproduct of Holmes getting his script wrong: that was the whole point.

I’m glad they tried one story like this though. The idea of space as a no-man’s-land full of individuals all trying to get rich is a very different view of the future compared to most Dr Who stories which are either utopian and hopeful or where corporations and federations loom large. It is, I fear, one of the more accurate portrayals of space travel in Who too, as the rich turn it into an opportunity to get richer at the expense of the poor and try to crowd them out of another market. It’s so very Dr Who, taking the extraordinary of the day and making it ordinary and second nature in the future, as a comment on changing times, while never taking away from the sheer awesomeness of space travel in any form. More than perhaps any other Dr Who story ‘The Space Pirates’ makes us think that space exploration is a natural part of mankind’s birthright and there had to be a programme like this in the Dr Who canon somewhere; what’s most amazing is that the last episode went out nearly three full months before Apollo 12 landed on the moon for real and made the extraordinary possible. It’s all so very real for a work of fortune-telling fiction, even if it’s a reality we sadly haven’t reached yet – and even if real means a lot of hanging around while nothing happens I kind of admire that aspect too. There’s also enough evidence out there that this story would have looked good in a way that’s lost to us unless the episodes are returned en masse. The model shots that have survived really are extraordinarily good and the audio and script suggest that there were a lot of them. The interiors, too, are so much more interesting than the generic ship interiors we get to see in the 1970s and 1980s and they’re treated like cars, each one reflecting the character of their owner (the Liz is an especial delight, on its last legs but still going and so full of character).  I can only guess this from the bits and pieces that are left but this story looks ‘bigger’ too, the set designers making full use of the move from the more cramped Lime Grove. Though even there they mess up the ‘space’ sequences (there aren’t any stars, perhaps because TV camera being what they were in 1969 they weren’t sharp enough to pick up on them during the Apollo missions coverage though the astronauts could see and commented on them). We really need to see this story to judge it fairly, because even more than normal only being able to hear this story – with all those silences and that awful dialogue – doesn’t do this story any favours.

For all the things going for it, for all the standards we ought to judge it by, for all the things that fans misunderstand about it, ‘The Space Pirates’ is still incredibly dull in any era. It sort of drifts about aimlessly, not least because it’s a story for the most part about people in rockets drifting aimlessly in space. Even Patrick Troughton is remembered by his son Michael complaining at the producer’s run through ‘this is episode two and we’re strapped in that bloody awful spaceship set – people will just turn off!’ And they did: viewers dropped to five million across the course of this story, the lowest since season three (Wendy Padbury, meanwhile, might be even more damning: despite this story taking up six weeks of her life she can’t remember anything about it at all – and her memory is pretty good as the DVD commentaries for existing stories demonstrate). The story itself isn’t bad by any means (it’s a lot closer to acclaimed Holmes classic ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ than fans often appreciate, a tale of gun smuggling rather than piracy but similar in the way The Tardis lands in the middle of a feud) but it’s told in the most boring means possible with all sense of drama and tension removed. The pacing is all over the place, with lots of slow talky scenes put together and cliffhangers that seem to come out of nowhere (with several ‘cheats’ to make them seem more perilous than they actually were).The Doctor doesn’t have much time with his soul twin character Milo and no scenes with General Hermick, which is a waste (he spends most time with Madeleine and even gets his first on-screen kiss from here, even though she’s the ‘baddy’ – albeit in understandable circumstances – that in other stories he would be trying to stop).

 Perhaps most of all you don’t care enough for the three hours this story takes to watch/listen to: it’s just two companies at war when all we really care about is getting the regulars to safety and they barely turn up. You suspect that Holmes always wrote this story to be slow, but having to add two extra episodes at the last minute means at time it feels as if it’s going in slow motion. The story desperately needs to get on with it  (the most exciting thing that happens in all three hours is the Doctor exploding a bomb so that it doesn’t go off. Yes that’s right, doesn’t go off) and it’s probably the weakest Troughton story as a viewing/listening  experience (though ‘The Dominators’ is far more ‘wrong’ on so many other levels and ‘The Underwater Menace’ is a special kind of crazy all on its own). It’s far from the top of my list of missing episodes I want to see returned and it’s amazing in retrospect that Holmes was invited back, never mind made such an important part of the Pertwee era. However it’s not quite the ‘worst ever story’ several fans rate it as. I did enjoy the book a lot and I suspect that in the unlikely event ‘The Space Pirates’ is ever found so we can actually see it this story will surprise fans by becoming a bit of a fan favourite in a way that the audio, the novel or the telesnaps can’t convey - or, at any rate, up from the bottom of story listings where it usually sits nowadays. That second episode that exists really is the worst of it (that episode was kept as an ‘example of Dr Who in 1969’ weirdly rather than returned by collectors, probably because circumstances meant it was filmed on 35mm film and the first Dr Who episode to be made away from the usual home at Lime Grove studios at the bigger TV centre studios 4 and 6).

POSITIVES + So much of this story takes place on board a space-shuttle that’s blown apart, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe trapped in a separate section to The Tardis. Extra larks (and an episode of pure padding) can be found by the Doctor accidentally sending the whole thing the wrong way and having to get it back again. Wirth so much emphasis on where we are the model shots have to get this right. Model shots vary considerably in Dr Who, particularly in the 1960s, however the clips that survive show them to be some of the best seen in the series, impressively futuristic (if still very 60s) and actually a lot better than the ‘models’ used in genuine space exploration documentaries of the day. There’s a nice lot of them too: the ‘Alpha Dart’ ship is huge, grand and sleek with its ‘minnows’ deliughtful smaller replicas, ‘Liz79’ is nicely ricketty as if it was built in a shed by an eccentric inventor and even the more static ‘alpha beacons’ (where the Tardis is lost) look better than they usually would. One of the reasons they look so good is that, for the first time, they were made by an outside contractor, Magna Models, who actually have the money and knowhow for this sort of thing. They also have a new cameraman who’s worked with Gerry Anderson and knows how to film models properly: rather than staring a static camera at them they move it on rails (‘dollies’) so that the camera shoots past a static model. It makes more difference than you might think and becomes the default way of doing things once we move into colour.

NEGATIVES -  Milo Clancey aside, the characters in this story are a pretty wet bunch and far below Holmes’ usual standards of writing and his famous double-acts. The theme of organised them versus eccentric inventor us is so well established early on that you’re on Milo’s side from the first even with that awful accent, which leaves us nowhere to go for character development. Holmes arguably goes a little too far making the representatives of nameless, faceless, characterless corporations nameless, faceless and characterless, even if it makes his point. He’ll get a lot better at this very quickly - so quickly you can’t believe his Pertwee scripts are by the same writer.  

BEST QUOTE: Zoe: ‘Milo, there’s one thing I don’t understand…’. Milo: ‘Well you’re a very lucky young girl - there’s about a hundred thousand things I don’t understand but I don’t stand around asking fool questions about them, I do something useful. Why don’t you make us a pot of tea or something?!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Space Pirates’ appeared on TV nine months after the TV comic strip ‘Dr Who And The Space Pirates’ (between issues #859 and #863 across June 1968) and though I have no proof whatsoever I like to think that a young excited Bob Holmes, knowing that ‘The Krotons’ would be on TV the following January, ran to his local newsagent to buy a copy of TV Comic to show everybody and thought ‘well I don’t like the story but ooh that’s a good title, they should have done more with that’. The two stories have almost nothing in common beyond the name: the print version is a sort of ‘Star Trek’ version of ‘The Pirate Planet’ , which shouldn’t be a surprise given that that show has just started being shown on UK TV a couple of years behind America. The Doctor is contacted by Zarcus, leader of the peaceful planet Neon who want protection from space pirates, led by the fearsome Captain Burglass, who keep stealing their food, part of a trade from neighbouring planet Barron which is, yep, you guessed it, barren. The pirates attack The Doctor, John and Gillian, capture them and make them walk the plank – into outer space! (Yeah Douglas Adams probably had a copy of this strip too thinking about it). Silly, even for TV Comic (which is saying a lot!)

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