Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 135: The Smugglers, Episode Two
Dear diary,
Before embarking on this episode, I popped in the William Hartnell disc of the Lost in Time collection, so that I could check out some of the surviving bits of The Smugglers on there, and have those in mind while listening through. Most of the clips like this that we have (and, I believe, all of the ones for this story in particular) are the result of censorship cuts in New Zealand when these serials were sold there in the late 1960s.
It would appear that the New Zealand broadcasters had a different view on what was acceptable in a children's series than we did in the UK, and so there's lots of moments from the programme that were cut out - usually only a few seconds here or there. I've seen several of these clips before when the DVD first came out and I savoured all these brief snippets of stories that I may never get the chance to see properly.
Some of the clips always struck me as being a bit odd: a few frames here, or the odd second or two from here, just to lessen the impact. Others seem far more fitting, and I think that might be the case with the clips for this story. The death of Longfoot in Episode One is quite brutal, as the knife lands squarely between his shoulder blades for example. It's ironic, in a way, that the only clips we have of The Smugglers, and of many other missing Doctor Who's only survive because someone once deemed them too much to be broadcast!
The compilation of these clips on the DVD also includes a few minutes of silent 8mm camera footage from the location shoot. It's obviously shot as behind-the-scenes footage either by a member of the crew or by a curious on-looker, as we move from shots of the Doctor being piled onto a cart, to others of pirates reading the day's newspaper, or shots of the BBC cars and vans parked around. This footage comes in handy, though, as another opportunity to see how this story might have looked - the locations really are gorgeous. I'm coupling all of this (and the tele snaps) with my own memories of Cornwall, where the other half and I spent a week last summer. I even keyed The Smugglers up on my phone ready to listen to while we were down there, but I never found the time to actually hear it.
As for the episode itself… well, the winning streak had to end sometime, I suppose. It's not that this is a bad episode, just that it hasn't grabbed me in the way that the last few have. Yesterday, I sang the praises of 'Doctor Who gets kidnapped by pirates' as a hook for a story, but today it seems to have already worn a bit thin. I'm not sure why that is, because there's plenty in here that I really did enjoy.
Ben and Polly, for instance, continue to entertain me, and they're great value when they play the part of witches to escape from imprisonment. They've both got very distinct personalities that work well against each other. There's also the opportunity for some great dialogue between the pair - I love Ben musing that he can't check himself back into the Navy in a 17th century barracks! They're still getting the hang of all this, and so don't settle into things quite as well as the Doctor has.
I don't know what's lacking at the moment, but I'm hoping it turns up tomorrow. I'm keen for the last Hartnell historical to go out with a bang!
