The Smugglers

The Doctor, with new companions Ben and Polly become entangled in the affairs of smugglers and pirates, when they land in Cornwall in the 17th century. The treasure of Captain Avery is hidden in the town and the villainous Captain Pike is willing to stop at nothing to get it.

Historicals in Doctor Who can have many purposes. They can show how different historical cultures were, they can show how famous events came to pass, they can comically reinterpret history. However, The Smugglers is a story driven by one concept: pirates are great. This is a story that sets out to do nothing more than tell a good story and it achieves this with gusto. As expected, there is a lot of ‘arrr’-ing, cutlass-play and at least one instance of the mainbrace being spliced. The pirates are a very colourful bunch, wonderfully played. Captain Pike is played with great relish by Michael Godfrey as a grimier version of Captain Hook. He commands his crew with an iron fist (sorry!) but knows that the only way to maintain control is to allow the men’s blood-lust to be sated. He is ably supported by George A. Cooper as the very inappropriately named Cherub. The smugglers are represented by the untrustworthy Jacob Kewper (played by David Kelly) and the Squire, as played by Paul Whitsun-Jones, an actor who portrays corpulent authority figures with immense energy, always looking as if he is about to burst a blood vessel.

It is commonly thought that the reason for Hartnell’s departure was ill health. This is strange as in this, his penultimate story, the Doctor takes a very active role and Hartnell throws himself eagerly into the role, and clearly has a ball doing it. The Doctor tricks his way out every deadly situation he ends up in and is clearly having the time of his life. Ben and Polly, though separated from the Doctor, manage to be resourceful and cunning on their own, and Michael Craze and Anneke Wills’s rapport is wonderful.

Surviving footage indicates that this story had excellent production values and effective location filming, but, even from the soundtrack alone, this is a fun story to listen to for all the reasons listed above, most notably the simplest one: pirates are great.

NEXT: The Tenth Planet