There are quite a few Doctor Who features in Not On Your Telly, including one in which I set myself the rather self-punishing challenge of writing a halfway decent article about the one story that nobody has ever had anything to say about - 1969's The Space Pirates. Here's part of my prevarication...
![]( "Doctor Who - Unwatched And Somewhat Slightly Erased")
It’s often been blithely stated – perhaps in an attempt to find something to actually say about it – that The Space Pirates, what with its proliferation of model spaceships and legendary reclusive galactic buccaneers and futuristic fashions from The Exciting World of Tomorrow, was a byproduct of post-Moon Landing mania for all things ‘space’, which would be all very well and good if it wasn’t for the fact that the Moon Landing was still a couple of months away when Milo Clancy and company were trudging very slowly through space towards nothing in particular . In truth, it’s more likely that scriptwriter Robert Holmes was drawing inspiration from a certain other vogueish genre with a proliferation of vast evocative landscapes.
The big screen Western was not only still very popular in the late sixties, it was actually enjoying something of a resurgence in popularity; while The Space Pirates was airing, Hang ‘Em High was still playing to packed houses in the UK, while The Wild Bunch, Paint Your Wagon, True Grit, The Undefeated and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid were already starting to be hyped up ahead of release, along with at least ten other now little-remembered high profile Westerns released in the second half of 1969 alone. As The Space Pirates essentially involves little more than outlaws, varmints and the space-age equivalent of covered wagons, only all done with silly metal helmets so nobody would ever notice, the maths kind of does itself there.
It is worth making a comparison at this point, however, with another traditionally ignored corner of a cult icon’s back catalogue that somehow got caught up in the culmination of the ‘space race’ but has since been largely ignored; at the exact moment that The Space Pirates was boring Saturday teatime viewers rigid, David Bowie was holed up in Trident Studios recording an album that would yield a certain hit single named Space Oddity. That said, close examination reveals the accompanying self-titled album to be a strong set of songs that may lack cohesion but hold more than enough promise, and indeed hints of the Glam Rock sound to come , to make it a worthwhile listen. Time has been somewhat less kind to Dom Issigri and the gang.
Another interesting behind-the-scenes fact was that although the story was entirely studio-bound and, barring the many filmed model effect sequences, recorded entirely on videotape, episode two had to be transferred to film for broadcast for technical reasons (which almost certainly ensured its accidental survival to this day, but that’s another story), and if you’re currently staring at the page in disbelief and spluttering that it’s essentially the exact opposite of an interesting fact, well that just underlines what a struggle it’s proving to find anything worth saying about the making of The Space Pirates, a story which it should be pointed out had the unintentionally hilariously apt production code ‘YY’. Perhaps we’d better take a look at what happened when it was transmitted, then. Although Dwight D. Eisenhower would sadly never get to see episode six of The Space Pirates, fashion designer Alexander McQueen and the late nineties pop chart-straddling combination of Blur guitarist Graham Coxon and Catatonia vocalist Cerys Matthews all did some very loud bawling in the delivery room while it was airing, and both John Lennon and Paul McCartney got married, presumably employing somebody at Abbey Road to write down what happened in the episodes they missed due to being on honeymoon. Peter Sarstedt sat atop the pop charts with the appropriately dull Where Do You Go To My Lovely?, whilst ITV attempted to lure viewers away with Land Of The Giants, one of the dreariest – and that’s no mean feat – of Irwin Allen’s long history of attempting to palm drying paint off on viewers. And while all of this was happening, The Space Pirates passed almost unnoticed, which indicates just how unspeakably dull the average viewer must have found it.
The transmission tapes were wiped the following year , and in time it would acquire the dubious distinction of being the missing story that fans were the least bothered about seeing. A film copy of episode two did, however, remain safely on the shelves of the BBC’s more rigorously maintained Film Library, and almost as if it was somehow aware and indeed mischievously resentful of its own ignored status, episode two has proved to be the celluloid bad penny of lost sixties Doctor Who. Duplicate prints have turned up in the hands of private collectors, stray film footage turned out to originate from it, and perhaps most you-couldn’t-make-it-up of all, when the BBC were contacted by a collector who had owned a video recorder in the late sixties, the one episode of Doctor Who he’d retained an off-air recording of turned out to be... well, you can work out the rest. Even the ‘film trims’ that were found a while back through the archival equivalent of peeling off layers of old wallpaper – and in which, it has to be said, absolutely nothing happens at all despite appearing to have a running time of seventy eight million years even if you watch them on fast forward – were trimmed from sequences that ended up in episode two. As a situationist self-perpetuating practical joke on Doctor Who fans, it can’t be bettered, but in all fairness this belief-beggaring ubiquity has probably done more than anything else to stoke up the collective lack of interest in the story as a whole.
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You can find the full version of this article, and lots more about Doctor Who besides, in Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my articles on the archive TV we never get to see, which is available in paperback here or as an eBook here.
It’s often been blithely stated – perhaps in an attempt to find something to actually say about it – that The Space Pirates, what with its proliferation of model spaceships and legendary reclusive galactic buccaneers and futuristic fashions from The Exciting World of Tomorrow, was a byproduct of post-Moon Landing mania for all things ‘space’, which would be all very well and good if it wasn’t for the fact that the Moon Landing was still a couple of months away when Milo Clancy and company were trudging very slowly through space towards nothing in particular . In truth, it’s more likely that scriptwriter Robert Holmes was drawing inspiration from a certain other vogueish genre with a proliferation of vast evocative landscapes.
The big screen Western was not only still very popular in the late sixties, it was actually enjoying something of a resurgence in popularity; while The Space Pirates was airing, Hang ‘Em High was still playing to packed houses in the UK, while The Wild Bunch, Paint Your Wagon, True Grit, The Undefeated and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid were already starting to be hyped up ahead of release, along with at least ten other now little-remembered high profile Westerns released in the second half of 1969 alone. As The Space Pirates essentially involves little more than outlaws, varmints and the space-age equivalent of covered wagons, only all done with silly metal helmets so nobody would ever notice, the maths kind of does itself there.
It is worth making a comparison at this point, however, with another traditionally ignored corner of a cult icon’s back catalogue that somehow got caught up in the culmination of the ‘space race’ but has since been largely ignored; at the exact moment that The Space Pirates was boring Saturday teatime viewers rigid, David Bowie was holed up in Trident Studios recording an album that would yield a certain hit single named Space Oddity. That said, close examination reveals the accompanying self-titled album to be a strong set of songs that may lack cohesion but hold more than enough promise, and indeed hints of the Glam Rock sound to come , to make it a worthwhile listen. Time has been somewhat less kind to Dom Issigri and the gang.
Another interesting behind-the-scenes fact was that although the story was entirely studio-bound and, barring the many filmed model effect sequences, recorded entirely on videotape, episode two had to be transferred to film for broadcast for technical reasons (which almost certainly ensured its accidental survival to this day, but that’s another story), and if you’re currently staring at the page in disbelief and spluttering that it’s essentially the exact opposite of an interesting fact, well that just underlines what a struggle it’s proving to find anything worth saying about the making of The Space Pirates, a story which it should be pointed out had the unintentionally hilariously apt production code ‘YY’. Perhaps we’d better take a look at what happened when it was transmitted, then. Although Dwight D. Eisenhower would sadly never get to see episode six of The Space Pirates, fashion designer Alexander McQueen and the late nineties pop chart-straddling combination of Blur guitarist Graham Coxon and Catatonia vocalist Cerys Matthews all did some very loud bawling in the delivery room while it was airing, and both John Lennon and Paul McCartney got married, presumably employing somebody at Abbey Road to write down what happened in the episodes they missed due to being on honeymoon. Peter Sarstedt sat atop the pop charts with the appropriately dull Where Do You Go To My Lovely?, whilst ITV attempted to lure viewers away with Land Of The Giants, one of the dreariest – and that’s no mean feat – of Irwin Allen’s long history of attempting to palm drying paint off on viewers. And while all of this was happening, The Space Pirates passed almost unnoticed, which indicates just how unspeakably dull the average viewer must have found it.
The transmission tapes were wiped the following year , and in time it would acquire the dubious distinction of being the missing story that fans were the least bothered about seeing. A film copy of episode two did, however, remain safely on the shelves of the BBC’s more rigorously maintained Film Library, and almost as if it was somehow aware and indeed mischievously resentful of its own ignored status, episode two has proved to be the celluloid bad penny of lost sixties Doctor Who. Duplicate prints have turned up in the hands of private collectors, stray film footage turned out to originate from it, and perhaps most you-couldn’t-make-it-up of all, when the BBC were contacted by a collector who had owned a video recorder in the late sixties, the one episode of Doctor Who he’d retained an off-air recording of turned out to be... well, you can work out the rest. Even the ‘film trims’ that were found a while back through the archival equivalent of peeling off layers of old wallpaper – and in which, it has to be said, absolutely nothing happens at all despite appearing to have a running time of seventy eight million years even if you watch them on fast forward – were trimmed from sequences that ended up in episode two. As a situationist self-perpetuating practical joke on Doctor Who fans, it can’t be bettered, but in all fairness this belief-beggaring ubiquity has probably done more than anything else to stoke up the collective lack of interest in the story as a whole.
You can find the full version of this article, and lots more about Doctor Who besides, in Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my articles on the archive TV we never get to see, which is available in paperback here or as an eBook here.