The Smugglers by Brian Hayles
10 September - 1 October 1966
Well, they can't all be winners, can they? I didn't go into this with the highest expectations, and accordingly was not particularly disappointed that The Smugglers never quite transcends its limitations to somehow become something very interesting. It is quite interesting, however, that all the first serials of Seasons Two, Three, and now Four have all been curiously low-key affairs. While I liked Planet of Giants quite a bit, it wasn't exactly a blockbuster either. This is, I think, partly because the notion of "event television" has not yet taken hold, and with seasons spanning the better part of the year, nobody yet seems to have decided that the beginning and end of a season ought to be treated as any different from the rest of it. This means that it's difficult getting excited about this in most respects.
As a first adventure for Polly and Ben on the TARDIS team, I have to say that I might have wished for more. While their central dynamic together is developed here to a degree, it's still hard to say that I have a clear idea of either's personality yet, or what their relationship to the Doctor will be like. Polly in particular takes a bit of a backward step here; between spraining her ankle and getting freaked out about a rat, she comes dangerously close to reenacting a Susan worst hits compilation, with her best moment probably being her peevish remark about everyone calling her a "lad". (Though how anyone could mistake Anneke Wills for a boy, I could never guess.) She can also magically discern whether any given coastal landscape is Cornwall, so I guess that's nice, too.
As a pirate story set in Cornwall, of course, this story owes no small debt to The Pirates of Penzance, which wedged this historical epoch firmly in the public consciousness in the late 19th century and never quite left. This seems like it was an inevitability, as a continuation of Doctor Who's theatrical inheritance, given that the Doctor mentioned knowing Gilbert and Sullivan as long ago as The Edge of Destruction. It's remarkable, then, that the vibrancy of that production is totally missing from a serial so obviously inspired by it, and of course there's a complete lack of music... Doctor Who will finally make up for this oversight many years in the future, when Doctor Who and the Pirates comes along, but more on that in about a trillion years. There's also the obvious connection with The Curse of the Black Spot, the most unlikely prequel imaginable, but more on that too in about a trillion years + 1.
This all came out sounding a little more negative than I intended, as this story is only rather middling and not what I'd call bad, but through it all I really was just tapping my foot and waiting for The Tenth Planet to come along...
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 10 May 2020.)
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