The Pirate Planet

It was perhaps inevitable that someone who worked on Doctor Who ended up really famous. You may consider that a lot of people to have toiled on the series fulfil that brief, in so much as they at one time became a household name, or appeared on prime time documentaries, or had high street fiction written about a character they once played. But Douglas' Adams fame is a bit different - it's of a wider, more respectable brand. He's considered in some quarters to be LEGEND famous, and people who don't like Doctor Who buy his books. How many other of the show's writers can say that? Well, Douglas Adams can't now because he'd dead, but he once could.

You might think it surprising, or even damning, how few other artists to have touched Doctor Who have risen to this height of fame. Sure, there are actors to have arguably gone on to bigger and better things, and more people probably know Peter Davison these days for The Braithwaites and other things than for his part in Doctor Who. Yet he's still no Kevin Costner of the acting world. He probably won't be remembered as being one of the greats of his profession. I think Douglas Adams might be. And that he began to earn his craft writing a Doctor Who adventure is a curious thing for us to have to contend with.

In no sense have we ever embraced the man as a collective group. I don't mean this literally; the sight of a couple of thousand Doctor Who fans standing outside his house wanting to give him a hug might have taken him from us before even that wretched rowing machine did. But there is little love for him, and by association only a begrudging respect for his stories, to be had anywhere. Consider that "The Pirate Planet" is arguably almost as well written as "Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy", of a similar style and even uses the same planet names. It could fit into that book, or form the basis for a sequel, without anyone noticing. And yet while "serious" literary hands hold "Hitchikers" up as a modern classic, the prototype he gave us rarely troubles the top of our lists of favourite stories.

Let's stop to think about what this means. Are we saying that the likes of "Caves of Androzani" and "Genesis of the Daleks" are classic science fiction works, more worthy than "The Pirate Planet" and, therefore, "Hitchhikers" of cultural canonisation? More interestingly, do all those people who rushed out and bought "The Salmon of Doubt" (basically the last scraps of Adams written works scandalously compiled into a book along with any other old tat they could scrape off his hard disk) not know about the real "lost" Adams work? How many of them bought "The Pirate Planet" on video?

I'm being deliberately ignorant of common sense here. "Hitchhikers" is a classic book, and "The Pirate Planet" is a low-budget TV script hurriedly knocked out by the same writer to pay the rent that week. Yet you would still think we would more rapturously cherish what amounted to a bit of a coup for us; the imaginative, joyful cutting of teeth of possibly one of the most loved comedy/science fiction writers of our age. And there he was, penning a Doctor Who story for Season 16. It's there, on the shelf, as proof. But it's a hollow victory to be had, noting that an author Dad liked at college, THE Douglas Adams, actually did Doctor Who you know. It's like people who try and make out Doctor Who had sophisticated special effects by showing people the beginning of "Trial of a Time Lord". You're trying to prove it's something it never was, so give up. If you don't love it just for being Doctor Who, why are you here?

Thus, "The Pirate Planet" isn't really worth crowing about because we know it's only a moderately good Doctor Who story. It would no doubt make a great "Hitchhikers", but that's a different thing altogether. And the real reason we rightly have this standoffish attitude to Douglas Adams is because he dashed off and abandoned us the moment the money came calling, as anyone in their right mind would have done. We didn't get so much as an interview, a novelisation or a documentary appearance after his final story went out. Loyalty? Did he need to be loyal? The likes of Sophie Aldred and Barry Letts will still do anything for us, but who's really helping who? Doctor Who parted ways with Douglas Adams long ago, and there's no real point in pretending otherwise.