A very brief return to my beloved The Space Pirates; for a bit of archive for it that fell through the gaps in what I was writing, which can then lead us elsewhere

From The Spectator's review of the first episode of The Space Pirates, in 4 May 1969 issue:

“It would not, I think, have been possible to achieve a sequence like that in last Saturday’s episode showing men walking in space had we not all by now seen precisely such manoeuvres being carried out by Russian and American astro/cosmonauts. The effect was so excellently simulated that for a moment of two I was undecided whether what I saw was not perhaps a piece of documentary film fed into the programme.”

That review was by Stuart Hood, who was the Controller of BBC Television from 1961-1963, including the period when Doctor Who launched. What is incredibly odd from a 2026 partisan perspective is that Hood was, while one of The Spectator’s TV critics for five years, not merely no kind of conservative, but a literal Communist, having been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who would in the 1970s, after taking up a role at the College of Arts, become active member of the Workers Revolutionary Party and largely devote his time to unionising arts workers.

Which is somehow even odder than him having been, decades before being a BBC executive, British Army intelligence’s liaison with anti-fascist partisans in wartime Italy. Elsewhere in the same review Hood noted that his children were aware that Troughton was about to leave Doctor Who and this meant they regarded the Doctor’s own safety as less inviolable than usual, often speculating if, when and how he would be killed -

“[they] had prematurely decided he could not survive the detergent. [i.e. the foam in The Seeds of Death] They are now in a state of agreeable tension over his chances in space. What’s interesting is they are perfectly aware that if Doctor Who dies it will be the result of decisions taken by the actor who plays him.”

Hood’s successor as The Spectator’s TV critic, Patrick Cosgrave also liked reviewing Doctor Who, although did so mostly through the medium of lusting after Katy Manning as Jo Grant. Although this unashamed running crush in the TV pages did come in a broader context of Cosgrave saying he had been a fan of the series for most of its near decade of existence and his admiring “… how fresh and vivid the whole creation still is after so many years, and well self-confidence and empathy with the spirit of the thing has sustained”.

But Miss Grant’s departure from the series in The Green Death (1973) disappointed him more even than her many other wannabe suitors in the audience. Cosgrave was disgusted not just at her choice of husband but also of her endorsing of his environmental causes, writing for the 26 May 1973 issue that -

“At the beginning of the new story, my beloved Katy Manning - I have been crazy about her since she first came on th scene - has been required to demonstrate a ludicrous enthusiasm for some ecological cranks in South Wales… the great thing about Miss Manning is that she been not merely decorative - like all the Doctor’s female assistants, but more so than any of the others - but useful as well, able to fight and pick locks. It is a pity to show her as the victim of silly teenage enthusiasms, and not very bright to boot”.

This was a furthering of his earlier stance on Planet of the Daleks that - “One thing causes me concern… a growing tendency on the part of the Doctor to moralise tediously about peace, love and brotherhood” lamenting the Doctor had sent the victorious Thals home “with an injunction to make nothing of their achievements, lest it encourage their follies to admire war”.

Which makes Cosgrave, probably, the first person to declare that Doctor Who is all rubbish now because it’s gone all right on / PC / Woke. Do write in if you can think of an earlier one.

But then Cosgrave is an even more implausible, and also far more logically Spectator-ist, figure. The Irish-born Cosgrave was a self-styled “west Brit”, who declared himself “to the right of Lord Salisbury” and a key political commentator of the wave contemporaneously known as “reactionary chic”. As the Spec’s political editor he was responsible for scathing, contemptuous editorials about the then Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, being too centrist, too pro-European and weak.

Heath, of course, saw nothing to admire in war; but then like Stuart Hood (and unlike Cosgrave, who was born in 1941) he had been on active service during the conflict; taking an artillery battery from the Normandy Landings to the fall of Berlin, for which he was mentioned in despatches. He also wrote powerfully in his autobiography of sleepless nights resulting from the wartime necessity of overseeing the execution by firing squad of an allied solider who had been convicted of rape. Cosgrave had only seen war films, whereas Heath had actually seen war.

Following Heath’s fall from the Tory leadership, for which Cosgrave liked to take credit, he was an adviser to Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Opposition (1975-79) but his increasingly out of control addictions precluded him working for her in government. He later wrote an admiring biography of prominent racist Enoch Powell, and died of complications from alcoholism.

Ted Heath’s opinions on Planet of the Daleks remain sadly unknown.