‘Excuse me, I’m looking for a planet called Calufrax. It’s about fourteen thousand kilometres across, it’s an oblate spheroid and it’s covered in ice. Excuse me, excuse me. Has anybody seen a planet called Calufrax? Funny, nobody’s seen it.’
‘What are you doing it for, Captain? It doesn’t make sense and you know it. I can understand the life of a full-blooded pirate, the thrill, the danger and the derring-do, but this? Hidden away in your mountain retreat eating other people’s perfectly good planets, where’s the derring-do in that?’
‘Appreciate it? Appreciate it? What, you commit mass destruction and murder on a scale that’s almost inconceivable and you ask me to appreciate it? Just because you happen to have made a brilliantly conceived toy out of the mummified remains of planets. What’s it for? Huh? What are you doing? What could possibly be worth all this?
Part of the way through ‘The Pirate Planet’, I realise that almost imperceptibly it has changed from a silly old story about a blustering, cybernetic pirate and his parrot, into something much cleverer, basically ‘Great Expectations’ in space, with physics and stuff. It manages to do this without a huge narrative leap or flashy tonal shift, rather organically in a way that I rather like. In the process, ‘The Pirate Planet’ becomes the story of someone trying to hold back change and to halt time – time dams keeping a frail, fragile old body alive moments before death, entire planets crushed to a husk just to keep an insane woman alive, looking young and beautiful and above all in power. It is ‘Great Expectations’ – Miss Haversham (Xanxia) in the time dam still in her wedding dress (crown and finery), while Estella (the Nurse) acts as her avatar in the world outside of her room (throne within the time dam). It would be stretching it to paint the Captain as Magwitch. The eye however is cleverly drawn throughout the earlier episodes to the blustering Captain, with his electronic parrot and fawning, Uriah Heap style sidekick – Mr Fibuli. The Nurse stands in the background, all passive aggression, slowly though through the piece it becomes apparent that all is not quite as it seems.
So, this is our introduction to Douglas Adams – a brilliant, mercurial talent. In some ways, he is like one aspect of Robert Holmes – the clever, ripe dialogue and larger-than-life characters. The Captain and Mr Fibuli in particular are a Holmes double-act if ever I saw one. What he lacks is the balance of Holmes – the scares, the cynicism and the sense of the grotesque. He does however make up for this with plethora of brilliant ideas, this story is packed full of them – the planet that materializes around others, the Queen ravaging entire worlds just to preserve her life and stay young (a sort of ‘Countess Dracula’ with planets instead of nubile virgins) and the blustering villain who turns out just to be a puppet – who can be switched off by his nurse via a remote control. It struck me that if you took the ability to draw interesting, funny characters of Holmes, with the mad idea generation of Baker & Martin, you pretty much end up with what Douglas is doing here. It is a blend of Dickens and fairy-tale picture book – all Pirates with parrots and evil Queens, all combined with Newton and mad physics.
However, just to step back for a moment…
Meanwhile over on planet Tom, the story so far…
Graeme MacDonald, Head of Serials is worried about one of his programmes. He is effectively Exec producer on ‘Doctor Who’ and has a leading man, one of the most recognisable figures in Britain by 1978, who is starting to veer out of control. To appease Mary Whitehouse, Graham Williams has been brought in as producer. Now Graham is a decent man, but Tom has scented blood and is using the change to throw his weight about and Tom isn’t an easy man to deal with – eccentric and mercurial, sometimes brilliant, but also physically imposing, a drinker with a quick temper and despite being a hero to generations of children, I think a bully at times. He is also really easily bored. All of which manifests itself in the show in the form of changing any lines he doesn’t like, throwing scripts about, insulting writers (Chris Boucher could have cheerfully strangled him), bullying directors and increasingly coming up with lots of comic ‘business’ – mugging, pratfalls, dashing in and out of scenes, breaking the fourth wall etc. Now Douglas Adam’s script turns up and well, it offers plenty of opportunity for Tom and the rest of the cast to play up further, MacDonald worries about the credibility and authority of the lead character in the show and orders changes to the script to avoid this.
All of which oddly results in a story that feels like it should be, but isn’t actually all that funny – it is fun I hasten to add – just not that funny, especially since the sort of physical comedy that Tom introduces is pretty rubbish, sub-Crackerjack (a BBC comedy show for kids at this time) level stuff. In comparison with ‘City of Death’ or even ‘Shada’ I didn’t really laugh at all this time around and it just feels a bit lacking in wit and style. I’m sure with all of this Tom also changes things for the better, he just doesn’t really have a filter and woe-be-tide anyone who disagrees with him or that he just doesn’t like. Look, some people don’t like Tom, some love him, some love the Hinchcliffe era, some the Williams era and some the funereal Tom of Bidmead’s season 18 or various combinations of these. My view is that he is brilliant and I absolutely love him, but he is also flawed and after season 14, he loses the balance of his first 3 years – when he played the part with such conviction, convincing the audience that he was wracked with pain or fighting for survival, but then could turn in an instant into a charming, silly, eccentric, funny best friend of Sarah and Harry.
The Tom of season 16 more often disarms and diffuses the menace instead of trying to sell it – which is fine when it is funny and witty, but quite often it isn’t much. Doctors have done this before – but Troughton got away with this, he was small of stature and played the part mostly as if things were out of his control, so despite the humour that he and Frazer Hines often added, the menace usually towered over them and was usually credible (Quarks aside!). In comparison, Tom is big and imposing, strident and domineering, when he treats the whole thing flippantly and doesn’t care about the menace, well it is just diminished, everyone is left trailing in his wake and we get that sort of thing a lot in these years. In this story though, he does successfully flip things at the last moment with his brilliant playing of the ‘but what is it for’ speech, but this seriousness and righteous anger is far less frequent than in his early years. If you want a lighter programme (Graham William’s remit) then this approach works and it is often fun, but it loses an awful lot of the tension and drama in the process. Each to their own, but for me at this point Tom is starting to forget that he is an actor and actually believes he is Time Lord. I don’t think he ever quite recovered and neither did many of the poor sods who had to work with him.
Dreary rebels and space cars
My main problems with ‘Pirate Planet’ though aren’t the script or dialogue, which I think are decent, it is more some of the realisation. A familiar problem is the depiction of the local populace. Especially coming after well-realised world of ‘Ribos’, the people of Zanak are a dreary lot, classic ‘Doctor Who’ is liberally sprinkled with them. The performance of Ralph Michael as Balaton in particular is redolent of 60’s stories like ‘The Ark’ or ‘The Dominators’ – highly theatrical (almost a male Jenny Laird – he has a decent CV so maybe this is a one off?), the rest of them aren’t much better either. This crept back in to some extent with season 15 (I’m thinking of things like ‘Underworld’) but the last lot of rebels/villagers as poorly realised before this were probably in ‘Planet of the Spiders’. This lot won’t be the last unfortunately. The main cast playing the Captain, Mr Fibuli, the Nurse/Queen are pretty reasonable – we’ve had better, but also a lot worse.
Some of the effects are very neatly done (the main model of the bridge for example), others less so. In particular the decision to try to depict the air car (a concession to ‘Star Wars’?) flying up to the bridge is a step too far. Talking of which, I do love the fact that it is obviously just a speed boat with a few bits added to it! It reminded me of British quiz show Bullseye, where working class blokes competed at darts to win the mystery prize, often a speed boat – obviously just the thing that was missing from their lives. Equally baffling is the decision to keep the segments of the key to time in an old fridge… Also, I always forget how much of the story was shot on location – in my mind it always feels studio-bound. It really isn’t, but the locations chosen don’t feel like they belong to the same world as the city and the Bridge. In fact, they look suspiciously like South Wales and the inside of a nuclear power plant. They do however give the thing a bit of scale. Of Pennant Roberts’s stories, ‘Face of Evil’ is probably the best looking, I quite like what remains of ‘Shada’, but whereas the cast all seem to like him, for me he is very much in the bottom tier of 70’s directors. His work here isn’t that great, but it is pretty much par for the course for the Williams era, at a time when we lose most of the show’s best directors from the previous 10 years – and of course the money runs out.
To balance this, the central ideas from Douglas are of course brilliant. The Captain who isn’t quite what he seems, the twist of the Nurse as the despot clinging to life, the concept of the crushed planets on display and the revelation that the 2nd segment is the planet Callufrax. The idea that if it looks like an economic miracle, it probably isn’t and is based on the misery of others, which is a recurring theme of the show (see ‘The Savages’ for example) – also a useful lesson for life. We also have quite a bit of fun on the way – the battle between K9 and Polyphase Avitron (Avatron? it seems to be spelled two different ways) is something that I remember enjoying when I was a youngster and if you have a daft robot dog, why not have some fun with it? It is the physical comedy – the anti-inertia corridor, Tom climbing from underneath the door between two guards to announce himself on the bridge etc. that is a lot less funny than Tom thinks it is. I don’t think it even seemed funny when I was 9.
So, like parts of ‘Trial of a Time Lord’, I don’t think it is the best realised of stories, despite having a strong set of central ideas. I think where it wins out though is that the script/dialogue is stronger, Tom despite his excesses still far surpasses Colin’s performance and Mary Tamm works well with him. The guest cast whilst a mixed bag, are strong enough for at least the main roles. I suspect that I don’t like this one as much as some do, but it was a pleasant enough way to pass some time. It was enough to make me want to seek out the novel, which also includes a lot of Douglas’s unused ideas from the earlier draft versions of the script. So, it would be interesting to see how much was lost in the editing process and at the behest of Graeme MacDonald.
By the way, I spent most of the time watching this trying to work out where I’d seen the actor playing Mr Fibuli before. As I’m writing this, I’ve given in and looked on imdb, he was Colin’s boss in Mel Smith’s BBC sitcom about an aspiring horror writer who works for the British Rail Complaints Dept – ‘Colin’s Sandwich’ – anyone remember that – or is it just me?
A Journal of Impossible Things 