Published: March 1990

Edition read: Target first, 1990

Coolest Cover: Tony Clark by default- is that Tim Allen playing the guard, though?

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: This is a definite corridors, tunnels and model spaceship story-bread and butter to Visual Effects at the time, surely.

The TARDIS materialises... "with a strange wheezing, groaning sound", for the last time in the Target range.

Childhood Recollections: My copy of this book only arrived last week, so the limit of my recollection is of seeing a copy in W H Smith in Clifton, probably not long after it had come out, but certainly once I’d moved on to "proper" books and wouldn’t have been seen dead with one of Uncle Terrance’s works on my shelf.

Ramblings: Rounding off the last few stragglers from Doctor Who’s black and white era must have been a particularly thankless task for Terrance Dicks, left as he was with some fairly unpromising material and stories which hardly enjoyed the best of reputations. That’s somewhat unfair to his adaptation of ‘The Space Pirates’, as although the story is one of the most overstretched ever to be broadcast and the one surviving episode turns out to be one where very little happens, Dicks’s adaptation is a leaner and more focused narrative which doesn’t drag at all and is easily read in a couple of hours.

What’s apparent from reading the adaptation all the way through and understanding the flow of the story is just how oddly-structured it is; the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are barely involved in the action until halfway through the story, and the sum total of the Doctor’s achievements is to meet Milo Clancey, go to Ta with him and defuse a bomb. Given that this was Robert Holmes’s second script for Doctor Who and was evidently stretched beyond its natural length due to the prevailing state of crisis in the production office at the time, it’s clear that he hadn’t as yet quite worked out how to involve the Doctor in the action and it’s tempting to wonder whether the story wasn’t an idea which happened to be in Holmes’s mind at the time and lent itself with a reasonable amount of ease to being tinkered and fettled into a Doctor Who. To give another idea of the overstrained structure of the story, we tend to judge ‘The Space Pirates’ on the basis of the surviving episode, which includes only two moments which further the story- the meeting between General Hermack and Madeleine Issigri (incidentally the only scene that Hermack appears to have with any character other than Warne) and the introduction of Milo Clancey- and an awful lot of very pretty model shots which don’t really translate to the printed page.

The characters don’t so much leap off the page as flap weakly like beached seals (although it’s debatable whether most of the characters were more than two-dimensional cutouts anyway), and Dicks doesn’t even seem to have that strong a grip on Milo Clancey who, as the first of Robert Holmes’s eccentric Doctor Who characters, would ordinarily expect to appeal most to Dicks’s writerly instinct. That said, ‘The Space Pirates’ is at least in theory an action story, and that’s where Dicks concentrates his efforts so that the story moves quickly- Clancey apart, it’s not a strong character story and doesn’t have any real ideas to communicate. In the end, Dicks’s decision to take this particular line can’t be faulted, because it does at least give the story a sense of purpose and direction, but I can remember it being regretted at the time that his contribution to the Target range should end with such a disappointment. It’s not one of the greatest adaptations by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s still a tribute to Dicks’s involvement with Target that at this late stage in the game he was still prepared to reshape unpromising material and do his level best to ensure that the last monochrome story to be adapted would reach the shelves in the most readable form possible.