The Pirate Planet
(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 30/9/1978-21/10/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: Douglas Adams, director: Pennant Roberts)
Rank: 42
'What shall we do with the pirate captain?
He shouts so loud but it’s all distraction
Of true power he's got just a fraction
Of what he thinks he has as someone’s acting early in the story
He makes the Doctor walk the gangplank like he's sober
While K9 and a polyphase parrot dance the pasadoble
But just as the Pirate Captain can't get any lower
He's just the front for someone even less nobler in the middle of the story
Wahey the key to time rises
Hidden as objects in lots of disguises
In a story that’s full of surprises
Until being shrunk makes the pirate ship capsizes later in the story'
Who else could it be at no #42 in my rankings other than Douglas Adams? Arguably the most famous writer to ever pen a script for the series even now, his grand total of work for the show amounts to just three scripts, two finished stories and a year of re-writes of other people’s work during a stint as script editor, but due to a series of confusing events behind the scenes this is his only on-screen credit as full writer. In time to come Douglas’ fame with ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ will eclipse anything Dr Who had done since the first Dalek story, but here he’s very much the new boy on the block with less TV credits to his name than almost anyone else who had written for the series. At this point he’s five years out of Cambridge and determined to be a writer but struggling, taking part-time jobs to pay the bills while he fishes for any writing gig that would take him on, although to date the biggest catch he’s had is a couple of sketches for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Things are so bad by 1977 that he’s now penniless and has gone back to living with his mother, where he’s busy putting the finishing touches to the first series of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’, a script that seems as likely to go nowhere as all his other ideas. Douglas still sends it to the BBC just in case though and additionally sends it to the Dr Who office as a representative of his work, given that Who is still (just about) the closest brand to his own anarchic scifi-literate humour actually being made, even though he’s been turned down by previous production teams twice already (including a timelord-heavy script for Bob Holmes about an ‘aggression-absorbing machine’ that made the Doctor’s kind passive and filled with multiple complex time paradoxes, who said it contradicted almost everything ever made in the series but asked him to keep writing anyway, before stepping down from his post; a lot of it turned up in the third and weakest of the Hitch-hiker’s books ‘So Long And Thanks For All The Fish’). Douglas, despondent depressed and broke, saw it at as a last throw of the dice before giving up on his dream of being a writer – at least for now - and doing something that actually paid the bills. We were that close to losing one of the brightest smartest most creative minds of his generation, the author of officially Britain’s 4th most beloved book (according to a millennium poll anyway and one I didn’t trust as it was merely a snapshot of ever changing goalposts as they were back in 1999 and because there were no Terrance Dicks Target novelisations in there so it was obviously wrong).
But Douglas’ story is a
testament to not giving up even when it feels as if life, the universe and
everything is against you. For there was an unexpected miracle. Actually with
typical timing there were two. In June 1977 Douglas was asked to record a pilot
episode of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s’ for their drama slot. In July 1977 new Who script
editor Anthony Read inherits Bob Homes’ old scripts and loves Douglas’ work so
much that he asks him to think up a whole new story. In many ways too Douglas
gets lucky: Holmes loved comedy as much as the next script editor but he and
producer Phillip Hinchcliffe also loved horror and dark realism, neither of
which are really Douglas’ forte – by the time Williams and Reads take over
they’re under orders to add more comedy in and take the violence out. By August
1977 ‘Hitch-Hiker’s has been okayed for a full series which needs to be
delivered asap; almost the same post brought word that the Dr Who team needed
finished scripts for ‘The Pirate Planet’ sooner
than asap. ‘Hitch-hikers’ has a deadline to be broadcast in March 1978;
at first ‘The Pirate Planet’ is due for broadcast the exact same month. Suddenly,
after years of not having very much to do at all except take baths, Douglas is
plunged into a writing whirlwind, alternating between writing for his everyman
with a dressing gown and a decidedly no-man alien timelord with a scarf, that
seems to have put him off for life (anyone whose read anything about Douglas
will know his penchant for ignoring deadlines and the ‘whooshing noise they
make as they go by’ while he stayed in the bath longer and longer, a world of
endless possibilities still in his brain, while he put off the difficult task
of singling them out and writing them down. However so inexperienced is Douglas
and yet so inventive and fresh his voice that BBC head of serials Graeme
MacDonald pays closer attention to his scripts for Who than normal and actively
hates it, with this the only time he actively intervened and tried to get a
script outright cancelled. His complaints: it was stupidly ambitious, would
sail way over budget and its jokey tongue-in-cheek nature made it seem like a
parody of all the other Dr Who scripts on so far. MacDonald clearly just didn’t
get ‘it’, commenting that ‘the situation is over-familiar with the dominant
Captain and the ground proles working in the mines (he clearly didn’t get as
far as the episode three twist then!), that ‘there’s no plot development’ (when
the cliffhangers all reveal something new about this world), that ‘the
situation they are in is not stated until the end of episode two (that’s all
part of the great mystery) and that the characters seemed as if they came
straight out of ‘Treasure Island’ and would ‘inevitably lead Tom Baker to stop
taking himself seriously again (actually no: with everyone else playing daft
Tom goes for darker and brooding, becoming the only person in the room to
understand the scale of this threat).
The script was postponed
six months to the following year and might well have been dropped altogether
had any other script been anywhere near ready. Producer Graham Williams wasn’t
fully convinced either. But Douglas got lucky: an unfortunate accident during
the all-too-brief off season between seasons meant the producer was off with a
broken leg and script editor Anthony Read was solely in charge. He was an early
champion of Douglas’ work who understood the humour and how it only enhanced
the drama by pointing out the sheer absurdities of life and how there was more
real science attached to Douglas’ scripts than almost any other 1970s Who
writer. Read truly believed in ‘The Pirate Planet’, saw that Douglas’ parodic
elements worked by playing on audience’s expectations of what would usually
happen, turning the usual Dr Who template on its head. While Read agreed to
cutout two of the more outlandish ideas (the original script had the bridge of
the Captain’s ship extending to a mountain that it had crashed into, while
Queen Xanxia’s throne was in a separate mausoleum set) he put his neck on the
line and his enthusiasm won Williams over. To go over the head of the head of
serials was no small thing either: it’s not like either would have been sacked
for but it does rather put you in anger if the story you’ve stuck to your guns
for turns out to be unpopular or scores lower audience ratings. They really did
put a lot of faith in someone who was about as inexperienced as any Dr Who
writer had been thus far (only ‘Full Circle’
and ‘Timelash’ to come were ever written by authors with less experience than
Douglas).
Douglas rewards them
greatly though with a story that feels as if it’s by an accomplished
experienced writer with decades under his belt. It’s a story that feels very
different to anything Who had ever done before, pulling back episode to episode
to reveal that what we and at first the Doctor assumes about this world is a
pack of lies, (spoilers) the macho shouty captain so obviously in charge gradually
moving from the foreground to the background while his ‘nurse’, who barely says
a word in episode one and barely gets noticed, gradually moves to the front
revealed to be the power behind the throne. Pirates in space, aliens outside
the law wandering around taking other people’s things, seems like such an
obvious idea for Dr Who it’s a wonder it hadn’t happened before, the ‘pirates
in space’ motif is at one with other plots about ‘Frankenstein in space’ or
‘Dracula in space’ (it might well, in fact, be a deliberate ploy to do Bob
Holmes’ own ‘The Space Pirates’ from 1969 properly, as we know Douglas was a genuine
Whovian and that as a seventeen year old without much other scifi on TV to see
he’d almost certainly have seen it – and like the rest of us probably been
dismayed that it ended up a Wild West tale instead, with snarky comments about
rubbishy new-fangled solar toasters). That story from 1969 is more symbolic
though, with a humanity in the future that are doing what mankind always does
when exploring new places where laws don’t apply: in that story space is the
new Wild West or the Atlantic ocean, full of riches there for the taking by old
frontiersmen until the corporations cotton on. In this story we get an actual
pirate, working outside the law to hijack planets, complete with electronic
eye-patch, a gangplank that goes into space and best of all a ‘polyphase
avitron’, a robotic parrot who gets chased by K9 in a moment of scifi-slapstick
(alas the original idea, to have him say ‘pieces of silicate’, was dropped from
the rehearsal script – well, I found it funny. I’m even more sad they dropped
the immortal line ‘polyphase avitron want a cracker?!’ There was drama when the
prop went missing between studio days, only to be found in a skip outside TV
centre; I blame K9 who must have been stored nearby). The title alone is an
incredible pun: it’s both a planet that’s been over-run with pirates from the
future, a planet that acts like a pirate ship careering round in space
plundering resources, a planet (poor Calufrax) that’s been ‘pirated’ and taken
away and a planet that’s ‘pirate’ in the artificial, illegal sense and shouldn’t really be there (because it’s
really the second segment of the key to time). The fact that no one in this
story ever notices or comments on all the pirate things that happens (because
these people don’t have pirates or maybe even seas on their planet) only makes
it funnier that their history turned out this way (just check the way the
Doctor is forced to walk out the ship into the dark emptiness of space on what
looks awfully like a plank).
Only there’s another
sadder, madder layer beyond this being just a ‘Planet Full Of Pirates’. For a
start the spaceship we thought we were on turns out to be a planet, hollowed
out and sucked dry of all its resources and minerals, an ‘artificially
metricised structure consisting of a substance with a variable atomic weight’
ass I’m sure you already knew. The pirating isn’t stealing riches or resources
from unsuspecting space-travellers but taking whole planets and shrinking them
down for their ‘energy’, oblivious to the deaths of the people still alive on
them (it’s at one with Earth being blown up by the Vogons in Hitch-Hikers,
alien bullies who resemble the shouty Captain in more ways than one). The idea
of planets that literally materialise around other planets and destroy them
that way, pulling up all their resources without any care for what happens to
the people left behind, is genuinely unsettling and troubling in a way that
actually makes it the single scariest idea in the Williams era, whatever the
head of serials thought.
Only beyond that there’s
another level which only comes into focus during the last episode (spoilers):
despite all the shouting, all the gimmicks and all the bullying the real
‘villain’ isn’t The Pirate Captain at all but his nurse, the quiet sweet
self-effacing girl whose been using him as a front to take all the flak of her
plan all along. She’s the cruellest of baddies in so many ways, manipulating
others and responsible for the deaths of millions of people simply so that she
can (spoilers) live a bit longer while looking young – the darker side of the
‘Peter Pan’ motif and an obvious inspiration for the Cassandra in ‘End Of The World’/New
Earth’. In the end too another great twist: that what’s treasure to some is
trash to others and the pirates aren’t really after the gold and jewels we
think they are at all but energy, time, so Xanxia can stay alive for longer.
Because time if the final currency, not money, not power. She’s the natural
enemy of The Doctor because she resists change and defies karma. She doesn’t
evolve, doesn’t change doesn’t regenerate, doesn’t learn. The great irony is that Xanxia has spent all
her precious time zooming round the universe looking for other planets to suck
dry, little caring for the way she ends the lives of the people they steal
from, so doesn’t do any actual living with her time except look for the next
planet to conquer, wasting time despite knowing how precious it is. That’s not
silly, that’s profound.
And beyond even that is a
very Dr Who allegory about consumerism and capitalism and how greed is sucking
our world dry – and not necessarily by the people we shout at on the news
either but the power behind the throne we never get to see. Not least because
of the contrast with the more connected (communist?) world of the Mentiads, a
fascinating race of telepaths we never get to see enough of but who are a great
idea: these ‘pirates’ may have material wealth (and the old age it buys them)
but they lack the Mentiads’ sense of community and purpose, filling their
longer lives with more emptiness and money, wasting the extra time they’ve
bought for themselves when the Mentiads are living the live they dream of
almost for free (we don’t get to see the mentiads long enough to see how their
monetary system works, but this seems like the sort of community where everyone
has everyone else’s back). That’s at least three very DW stories from three
very different eras going on inside one another (which is no coincidence: fans
forget just what a big DrWho fan Douglas was, before his year as script editor
wore him out and made him less than enthusiastic about the series in later
interviews) each one of which would have been enough to fill other stories.
What starts out as a very broad and arch ‘comedy’ story full of caricatures
becomes, not unlike ‘Peter Pan’ actually, a tale of greater realism and hidden
sadness behind each revelation, as if the usual sort of late 1970s DW script
has become ‘pirated’ by a writer intent on smuggling a deeper story inside
it.
Even so ‘The Pirate
Planet’ is, I think its fair to say, the ‘safest’ story Douglas ever wrote in
his career, in that it’s the one most recognisable like something someone else
would write: its driven by actual plot developments rather than the unfolding
randomness of ‘Hitch-Hikers’ or the ‘plots side by side’ nature of his ‘Dirk
Gently’ detective books and there are no asides to the camera with narrative
devices such as Peter Jones’ book, the ’interruptions’ in the crime novels or
the jagged (Jagaroth?) stacked layers of his other two Dr Who stories. You can
tell too, I think, that this story started life under Holmes as it shares that
era’s predilection for taking famous existing works of literature and
converting them into futuristic Dr Who stories. This story, you see, is J M
Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ in space. The shouty cybertronic Captain with the
electronic replacement arm is Captain Hook. Mr Fibuli, the put-upon
long-suffering second mate, is clearly Smee. There’s a planet full of ‘lost
boys’, the Mentiads, who learn independence across the story and the ability to
think for themselves (quite literally after they develop psycho-kinetic energy
and become telepathic). Romana, only in her second story and still a rather
shadowy figure who doesn’t fully trust the Doctor yet, is turned into the
sceptical Wendy, desperate to believe in fairies but not yet ready to fully
commit. And the boy who never grows up? That’s clearly The Doctor whose having
a whale of a time running around and causing problems, colliding head on with
the ‘rules’ of this world and approaching everything with childlike glee.
Unless of course it’s also Xanxia, frozen in place with time dams and looking
as if she’s in her early twenties even thoug her real form is hundreds of years
old (with actress Vi Dalmar playing the ‘real’ Xanxia uncredited, infamously
getting paid the cheeky extra £30 she asked for as ‘danger money’ for being
asked to take her false teeth out!)That ought to leave K9 as the crocodile,
except that I think that’s supposed to be ‘time’, the thing that stalks
everyone on this story ticking down to the point where Xanxia will die as an
old woman (and what will happen to her underlings then? They can’t cope without
her, however odd that might seem in episode one). For what’s so great about
looking forever young anyway if it means you don’t learn anything from the
experience of your years? As The Doctor says to Romana, in an apparently
totally unconnected scene, ‘good looks are no substitute for a good character’.
By the end of this story, so magical is the illusion, that you really do
believe in fairies – except that by then the Doctor has shown us that
progressive science is really indistinguishable from magic.
For what many reviewers
miss with the sheer surrealist nature of this story is how accurate the science
is (well, in a Dr Who artistic license sort of a way anyway). Douglas adored
science. He read every scientific journal he could afford and immersed himself
in the latest data, often incorporating it into his books. That concept about a
‘hollow’ planet? It’s an actual NASA scientific paper, about the peculiar
feedback from other planets in our solar system that gravity is only present on
the surface of a planet not the core so there
is nothing to stop a planet in space forming around an ‘empty’ core – we
don’t need ours to have life on our planet or hold its atoms in place. That
linear induction corridor (the bit that looks like a scene from dungeons ‘n’
dragons show ‘Knightmare’ a decade early)? That’s theoretically possible, so
I’m told, and once discussed by Einstein. Psycho-kinetic energy? Well the human
brain does have a lot of power it never seems to use in everyday life and
there’s long been experiments into the idea that humans are really dormant
telepaths waiting to be ‘ignited’ by something (Dr Who’s big rival in this era
on ITV is ‘The Tomorrow People’ which sets the whole series round this idea, of
mankind mutating into our ‘true’ form as telepaths with special powers, a la ‘The Mutants’). That ‘suspended inertia
tunnel’ and the black holes held in stasis so that planets are kept alive but
small, the size of snooker balls? Well kinda: in theory it would be possible
one day if we were ever capable of building something with that much power.
That’s what’s so great about Douglas’ writing: while he’s always a natural
rulebreaker and rebel when it comes to story structure, interrupting his own
words or suddenly jumping between places and times and setting up things at
random he always plays to the scientific rules of what can and cannot happen.
It’s the reason his stories sound so real and plausible, even at their
strangest. Although admittedly the line ‘I’ll never be cruel to an electron in
a particle accelerator again’ is just…odd (it makes less scientific sense than
anything that actually happens in the story, or indeed any story this year,
Black and White Guardians and all). I’m sad they cut what might be one of the
most plausible plotlines in the series though: Originally Xanxia was offering
longer life to other people – in return for great wealth, which cost so much
the aliens then had to recruit other aliens, in a massive pyramid scheme the
universe wide that The Doctor then had to untangle (hey Big Finish just a thought…)
Where many fans have
problems is what he does to the everyday structure of your average Dr Who
template. We think we’re safe in where we’re going: there’s a shouty big tyrant
in charge whose clearly the one the Doctor is going to overthrow, complete with
sentences that always end in exclamation marks!!! and OTT catch-phrases like
‘by the eye of the sky demon!’ Only he’s a plaything, made up and controlled by
the ‘nurse’, a sleight of hand to make people stop looking at her – and while
we’ve had it a few times in modern Dr Who that a small and fragile looking
female turns out to be the real badass back in 1978 nobody was expecting that
twist at all. There’s the mystery of what’s happened to Calufrax and the twist
of all the little planets hanging in what’s basically the ship’s airing
cupboard, all that immense weight and power and people shrunk to a few
centimetres and hanging in mid-air. We also think that these pirates are after
literal treasure, before it turns out that’s not what they’re after all, with a
twist as early as episode one where the ground of Calufrax is paved with riches
and trinkets because there are so many to go around. Not forgetting, of course,
the single greatest use of the ‘key to time’ concept – not there in Douglas’
first few drafts of course but added when it got moved to season sixteen - as it turns out to be not an object (or even
a person) but an entire planet. You really get a sense of scale in this story,
that the White Guardian really does have super powers never before seen in the
series if he can just casually conjure a planet into mid air (so much more
impressive than turning a key into some rock or some statue to be discovered in
the opening few seconds of an episode, or even the clever but unlikely sixth
part that turns out to be a real life princess, which raises all sorts of
problems over how her changing metabolic structure whenever she eats something
or cuts her hair and fingernails; although how would that have worked if the
pirates hadn’t come along to shrink it though? Would it have turned into the
second key simply by The Doctor standing on it – and what would have happened
to all the people who called it home?) Plus how were they supposed to work that
out? You’d think one or other of the Guardians would have left a clue, whether
by making the planet look the same colour as the keys or making it half-white
and half-black or something. Still really clever though. It makes for a clever
twist in the ending too which is more than just the Dr waving his sonic
screwdriver at something: Calufrax isn’t really a planet so it can’t be mined
in the same way so the machine used to reduce the planets collapses in on
itself. The episode three cliffhanger is
particularly inspired, turning that idea of ‘how is the Doctor ever going to
get out of danger’ turned into ‘how did the Doctor know what was really going
on and why didn’t I see that?’ moment as the Doctor is forced to walk the plank
out into open space in a way he possibly can’t survive, before revealing that
(spoilers) this whole world is an illusion and he’s really just a hologram,
just like the ageing nurse (whose really a Queen). Oh and one more last great
twist: in a story filled with impossible technology from our deepest dreams the
story is solved by simply hurling a spanner at a control panel in a riot of
destruction and violence (something Douglas takes a step further with Duggan in
‘City Of Death’ but works really here
too). Every time you think you’ve got a handle on this story and worked out
what’s going on Douglas is smarter – and he makes The Doctor smarter too.
This is, alongside ‘The
Invasion Of Time’, the single greatest performance Tom Baker ever gave. For the
most part he’s his usual flippant self, annoying his captors by not taking
their threats seriously and looking impressively unperturbed throughout. Tom
revels in the witty intelligent script that makes his Doctor sound like the
genius he is and his comic timing is exceptional. This version of the Doctor is
more Groucho Marx in space than the alien of the other 4th Dr stories, a smart
aleck thumbing his nose at and with a quip to tear down and puncture authority at
every occasion even when things look hopeless, not the mute ‘Harpo’ he’s
usually pointed as because of the hair (that’s surely the 2nd Doctor
forever on the fringes of everything happening and waiting for the baddies to
give themselves away while merrily playing a recorder, while the chick-hunting
Chico is surely the 8th Doctor based on ‘The TV Movie’ or maybe the
10th, whilst the 5th Doctor is the more straightforward
and faceless Zeppo). However it’s the ‘other’ scenes that really sell this
story: as easy as it would be to send up a story where there’s a robotic
captain hook yelling his head off (as Graeme MacDonald feared he would) Tom
often goes the other way and plays against type. Instead of being another silly
person in a silly plot he’s dark and brooding, horrified and outraged at the
plan. ‘But what’s it for?’ he pleads with the Captain (when he seems to be in
charge) having discovered the planets, piercing through the appearances and red
herrings to the true heart of the matter. ‘You wouldn’t know what to do with a
planet anyway – beyond shout at it’ is a great 4th Doctor line too
when he thinks The Captain is just being another shouty villain. Tom is back to
being scary in this story, as ruthless and relentless as the villains and
suddenly in charge of putting things right and saving lives, all signs of
flippancy gone. All the more remarkable given that he’d just been in a very
serious accident: shortly before filming he’d been teasing a dog with a sausage
that had, quite reasonably, turned round and bitten him, badly on the lip. You
can really see it in the first episode before the scar’s healed; they write it
into the script without drawing attention to it by having The Doctor cover up
his face then bump it into the Tardis console then hold it gingerly in his
first scene. However the best thing Tom did all year might just have been
off-screen; a lot of children attended the filming at the power station,
gawping at their hero. Tom got quite fond of one who kept turning up and
talking to him enthusiastically between takes before he noticed he was standing
shyly at the back and looking scared. ‘What happened?’ the actor asked before
hearing that he’d been bullied that morning by a bigger boy at school. Tom then
spent his lunch break turning up at the school, finding out who the
open-mouthed bully was then warning him off, as he was ‘protected’. That’s the
4th Doctor all over, our hero tackling the bullies in authority and bringing
them down to size.
All of which is to say
that even though its ‘safe’ compared to ‘City Of Death’ ‘Shada’ and
‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’ ‘Pirate Planet’ is still amongst the most colourful,
imaginative, complex and ambitious stories Who had ever made up to that point
before Douglas’ other two scripts pushed the boat out even more. As a result it’s
a little under-rated this story I find, dismissed by people as a sort of minor
halfway house between two styles, but this is a concept big enough for its
halfway house to still tower over most of the rest of the series, full of
clever ideas, unique concepts and a sense of fun mixed with outrage that shows
that Douglas ‘got’ Dr Who and it’s audience a lot more than his naysayers ever
give him credit for. Like everything Douglas touched there are more ideas here
per minute than some six part scripts and where the five other ‘Key To Time’
scripts are slow and leisurely this one throws every idea at the viewer it can
think of so that your brain has to run to keep up. Needless to say, given
Douglas’ reputation, it’s one of Dr Who’s funniest most laugh out loud scripts,
even in palaces you’re not expecting it to be. Even some throwaway lines are so
clever: Romana borrowing the Doctor’s trick of offering jelly babies to
frightened locals then saying ‘I got them where you get yours…your pocket’,
Romana’s interaction with the guard that is ‘strictly prohibited’ and
originally ran much longer: ‘I’m from another world’ says Romana ‘There are no
other worlds – it’s a forbidden concept’ says the Guard ‘Well, forbidden or not
I am anyway’ says Romana reasonably), or The Doctor’s claim that ‘this is an
economic miracle – of course it’s wrong!’or the Doctor’s anecdote about meeting
Isaac Newton (which both totally contradicts and is so much better than what we
got in ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, without a mention of the word ‘mavity’ in sight). ‘The
Pirate Planet’ feels, in fact, like what it was: the work of a man who is
afraid he will never get a job writing ever again and Douglas fills up every
available space with a plot that’s one of Who’s most multi-layered and lines
that are some of its most quotable. The story certainly caused quite a stir
with the people making it – Tom Baker was an instant fan, pushing for Douglas
to take over the role of script editor the following year on the basis of just
this one story (a role that never quite suited him; Douglas always had too many
ideas to waste time tweaking other people’s and nearly had a nervous breakdown
trying to juggle that with turning the first Hitch-Hikers into a book), while
Mary Tamm, critical of pretty much all her other scripts, really enjoyed this
one too.
That’s always surprised
me, because while ‘Pirate Planet’ is a great story for the characters Douglas
invented, he’s not always the best writer at fitting his words into the mouths
of other people. While he nails the 4th Dr’s flippancy he doesn’t understand
Romana at all: she mostly stands around moaning and even gives out a most
uncharacteristic scream when threatened by the less than scary Mentiads (usually
when a character does something uncharacteristic like this I assume its an
overhang from an earlier draft and an earlier companion, but in this case that
companion would have been Leela who’d have been even less likely to scream). She
even gets the rather odd background detail that she got an air shuttle for her
70th birthday, the way most teens get their first car at
seventeen-eighteen. Only where did she fly it given that Gallifrey is enclosed with
a dome and you’re not meant to go outside? (I always assumed the 3rd
Doctor’s love of vehicles was because he wasn’t allowed any at home growing
up). While Douglas turns the usual capturing and escaping thing on its head by
having The Doctor comment to the guards about their rotten jobs and lack of ‘intellectual
stimulation’ (in a scene very like one from the first Hitch-Hiker’s
series/book) it’s still a story with a lot of the usual tropes of capturing and
escaping. For all that Douglas tries to subvert the other usual Dr Who
templates (by having an air car instead of Bessie for instance, or a corridor
that runs at the Doctor rather than the Doctor running down a corridor) this is
still a script that uses the usual Dr Who solutions to the usual Dr Who scriptwriting
problems. For all its brilliance there are moments when ‘The Pirate Planet’
simply takes the easy way out. If
Douglas writes well for any of the regulars it’s K9, who gets a decent amount
to do this story, getting his own ‘action’ sequences and becoming the Doctor’s
sounding board for longer than just the Tardis scenes for once while giving him
a ‘robot’ animal of his own to chase is delightfully dotty and helps give him
his own sub-plot (as silly as some say it looks, given that in reality it’s a
stagehand dressed in blue standing against a blue screen to be CSOd later,
moving the prop by hand to make it ‘fly’, it’s still preferable to K9 just
being a portable gun). A part cybernetic dog also belongs in a world of cybernetic
pirates more than most of the worlds we see in Who. Some of the dialogue too is trying so hard to
be ripe and funny and deliberately OTT to throw us off guard that it just
sounds corny: there are at least fifty too many ‘by the sky demons!’ lines
while the Mentiads barely get to say anything, being amongst the most thinly
drawn and under-developed races seen in Dr Who, a bunch of Uri Geller copies
who aren’t even that interesting (their
characterisation amounts to ‘they can do telepathy, nearly, sort of’ and that’s
it). The finale, while great on paper (the Doctor encourages the Mentiads to
use their new latent telepathic powers to literally ‘throw a spanner into the
works’ and blow up the time dam machine and let the planets fly) was never
going to work on Dr Who’s budget in a quadzillion Sundays and ends up looking
like what it is, the same stagehand in blue holding a spanner against a blue
screen edited in (and it looked even worse on broadcast and/or the VHS; rather
than have it float in mid-air missing its mark the restoration team add some
frames artificially to make it look as it if was actually hitting the machinery,
unbilled on the DVD itself so the fans wouldn’t moan). While many fans seem to
like it I’ve always found the ‘pirate’ spaceship set a lost opportunity too: it
should look like a ship, with an actual steering wheel and cybernetic rigging,
not be a boring generic big open space with the usual scifi stuff there (it’s
not a patch on the space-ships of ‘Enlightenment’
five years later). The air shuttle CSO is some of the worst seen in the series,
clearly a set with some ‘whooshing’ background effects. There are lots of this
story that looks simply awful, even when the story itself is really really
good.
Nevertheless that’s not
much to get wrong, especially given that Douglas’ only TV credit was for the
surrealist world of Monty Python before this (though we don’t know which sketches
he wrote surely Douglas was behind the ‘city pirate office block’ that runs
around plundering other office blocks?!) There are lots of little nuggets
sprinkled through the script though, gems of dialogue that make these
characters sing. Where lesser writers use comedy as the moments to pad out the
plot or keep people watching until the next big explosion, Douglas uses comedy
as a way of exploring these characters: The Pirate Captain is threatening
because he has no sense of humour and doesn’t know the jokes are on him,
something which turns him across four episodes from a tyrant to be feared to a
creature to be pitied. Especially as the Nurse has such a strong strait of
sardonic humour equal to the Doctor’s – we know, by the end, that he’s met his
match and found his nemesis when she starts matching him for wry comments (and
a Nurse is a close match for a Doctor after all, a natural nemesis that even a
‘Master’ isn’t). Above all you get the sense that someone has really thought
deep and hard about this story, of how Dr Who usually works and how this story
should go. No wonder, then, that Douglas Adams stood out a mile even before
anyone knew who he was. Een Graeme MacDonald wrote a letter to Williams
shame-facedly admitting that he was wrong and that ‘The Pirate Planet’ had been
an excellent story from start to finish. Nowadays fans tend to be slightly
dismissive of this story – they see the big dramatic acting, come across the
pirate costumes, hear the jokes in the dialogue and figure Douglas hasn’t quite
‘got’ Dr Who yet. I’ve been a bit alarmed, over the past thirty years or so, to
see this story tumble down the ‘favourite’ stories rankings’. But even if it
clearly isn’t perfect the nay-sayers are wrong: this is utterly and totally Dr Who,
taking the ordinary from our past and making it extraordinary in an impossible
futuristic setting, while underneath it all showing how some things never
change: that there will always be greed, always be pirates and how quite often
the real villain has just been using someone else as a front. Douglas somehow
takes on board the Dr Who brief but pirates it, creating a story that manages
to be both in keeping with the series and his own distinctive style. Yes his
other scripts ‘City Of Death’ and ‘Shada’ are even better, even more
imaginative and complex, but ‘Pirate Planet’ is still pretty darn brilliant.
Alas Douglas died before
getting the time to sit down and turn his script into a Target novel, while he
refused to do for the pittance offered (not when he had so many of his own
high-earning novels to write) and yet who was so protective he wouldn’t allow
anyone else to write it while he was alive – it was only in 2017 that a version
came out, one of the very last novelisations. That’s one reason I think why
this story hasn’t entered the fan psyche the way it should have done (there
wasn’t a novel of ‘City Of Death’
either but an ITV strike meant everyone saw that story as there was nothing
else on). Alas it’s a rather straightforward rendition of what we see on
screen: you suspect that, with all that extra space and character building
without actors getting in the way, Douglas’ later prose version of his story
would have been a real tour de force or the ages. Douglas admitted too, that he’d
got his briefs rather muddled up as he was working on them at the exact same
time (that he should have put this story’s impossible visuals like flying cars
into the radio scripts rather than try to re-create them for TV and put the
talky bits that slowed down Hitch-Hikers into Dr Who; listen out for a couple of in-jokes he sneaked past the
editor: lots of characters get to say ‘don’t panic!’ whilst the planet ‘Bantraginus
Five’ is very close to ‘Santraginous Five’, home of one of the five key
ingredients of that notoriously banned alcoholic drink, the pan-galactic Gargleblaster.
There’s even a line Douglas liked so much he used it in both works and we’re not
sure which came first: ‘Standing around all day looking tough must be very
wearing on the nerves’. Sadly nobody gets to read any Vardan poetry). You need
to remember though that, even if this style of story wasn’t quite inventing the
wheel then it was like inventing an atomic engine for the pedal bicycle; it’s
not the bicycle manufacturers’ fault that this was as far as TV budgets allowed
them to go; no it’s more to their credit that they recognised the existence of
an atomic engine at all from where they were standing (Anthony Read,
especially, one of the most unsung of all people in the backstage Dr Who
world). Even as 100 minutes of a TV series suffering a particularly difficult
time in terms of its budget, though, ‘The Pirate Planet’ is something of a
hidden treasure, one to be savoured and loved, written by a real frood who
clearly knew where his Dr Who towel was.
POSITIVES + The other
general fan consensus on this story is that Bruce Purchase, as the Pirate
Captain, didn’t get the subtlety in this story and became just another shouty
villain. Douglas himself was disappointed with the casting, having asked in the
script for the Captain to be much older (something director Pennant Roberts sensibly
over-ruled on the grounds that an elderly actor would struggle under all the
cybernetic prosthetic and shouting) – but that’s oh so wrong. I would say that
Bruce’s bravura performance might be the best thing about this story, because
it comes in layers: when we first meet him he’s a Davros type, ranty and
confident, so utterly in control and taking up so much space on screen that we
barely even notice the other people there. But then, slowly, little bit by
little bit, he starts to lose confidence: the Doctor is the first real foe he’s
ever fought and across episodes two and three he’s alternating between moments
of quieter horrific observation and even louder bluster to cover that up.
Ignore what his mouth is saying: the acting is all there in his eyes (well, eye
– the poor actor only gets to use one fully). Then in the denouement his world
comes crashing about his ears as he finds out that The Nurse has been in charge
all along and he’s just a stooge. Note how Bruce Purchase seems to get smaller
and smaller as the story goes on too, taking up less and less room on this
planet as he sinks back into his chair, subtle acting at odds with his ranting
delivery. Most of all, he goes to pieces when Mr Fibuli dies, his only true
friend: one of the few constants across Dr Who is the idea of karma and that
the villain of the week will get his comeuppance by the end, but here instead
of paying with his life The Captain pays with the life of the only person he
ever cared for and it shatters his heart into a million pieces. Suddenly he
realises that his actions and behaviour have consequences. You totally expect
him to have a tantrum, the way the Captain would have when we first met him,
but Bruce Purchase goes smaller than ever right at this moment, with a
tenderness and stillness that’s all the more moving because we don’t see it
coming.
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