The Smugglers

Ben and Polly have entered the TARDIS just as it departs London, and once the Doctor has set the ship in motion there is no going back. Ben is livid - he's going to be listed as AWOL if he doesn't get back to barracks. Polly doesn't mind - she's up for adventure. The Doctor is furious at the intrusion, but once the ship lands at the seaside he accepts the presence of the two young people and carries on despite Ben's protest. It's somewhere on the Cornish coast in the 17th century and the locals are not keen on strangers as they could be smugglers or worse. There is indeed treachery afoot locally as a group of smugglers lead by Captain Pike of the Albatross are looking for Avery's lost treasure - and the time travellers are caught up in the intrigue.

The Smugglers is not an exceptionally complicated piece of work as far as Doctor Who scripts go, and as a period piece it functions... good enough. It is rife with the usual devices of the Doctor and company being split up and all finding their way back together despite the dangers that surround them. The TARDIS is not available to them for the duration of the tale as the tide comes in and fills up the cave where it has materialized, forcing them to take local accommodation for the night. There's also a lot of being captured, escaping, and being captured again.

There's not as much of the Doctor in this one as had previously been; William Hartnell's health was going downhill fast and his ability to perform was going with it. Rewrites were made to shift a lot of the action away from him and have him knocked out and carried off, leaving new companions Polly (Anneke Wills) and Ben (Michael Craze) to carry more of the episode. The Smugglers then serves more as an extended introduction to these characters as they get to grips with life in the TARDIS; modern day menaces in London they were able to cope with but time travel... that's going to take some getting used to. And given that Polly was under WOTAN's control for much of The War Machines this is where she and Ben can actually be the new team together with the Doctor.

I got my first taste of The Smugglers when it was published as a Target book in 1988, penned onto page by Terrance Dicks. While Mr Dicks has contributed a great deal to the series over all the years I still find his writing style to be pretty bare bones and without anything really embellished, and the novelization of The Smugglers was no exception. Then again one can't expect miracles; with the original televised episodes long lost there's not much to go on aside from the off air audio recordings which I enjoyed recently, so not much way to faithfully build on something with little visuals to support it. Still, at the time in 1988 the Target range was pulling all sorts of old scripts out for novelization and without those there would be no enjoying the story at all until the CD versions were released years later.

But of course, that may not be a problem anymore if the speculation in this article here is indeed steeped in truth... wouldn't it be nice to get another whole story back intact?

Time is ticking down for the first Doctor now. He's only got one televised episode left, but BBC Books have provided one more novel to keep him around just a little bit longer...

NEXT EPISODE: TEN LITTLE ALIENS