Inspirations - The Pirate Planet

In 1971, a very tall young man went up to Cambridge University. He wasn't all that keen on actually working once he got there, however, being rather more interested in joining the famous Footlights comedy revue team. He was unsuccessful initially, so got together with a couple of friends and created his own comedy group. This led to him finally getting an invite to join Footlights in 1973. By the following year he had arrived in London, eager to write for TV and radio. Joining a Footlights Revue show in the West End, he came to the attention of Graham Chapman, of Monty Python fame -who invited him to write material together. John Cleese had stepped away from Python at this time. The young scribe wrote some material for Python's fourth series, and even appeared in a couple of sketches. Things then went quiet, and he worked away at an idea which had begun when he had done some hitchhiking around Europe. Imagine a Hitchhikers Guide for the whole galaxy...
Our writer - Douglas Noel Adams - decided that the idea might be a good one for Doctor Who, and so submitted it to the BBC. Robert Holmes said no thank you. Adams also submitted an idea for a Doctor Who movie - "Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen" - but this was also rejected. However, his ideas caught the imagination of the programme's new script editor, Anthony Read, and he was invited to submit a new story. After much, much, much revision, this would become The Pirate Planet, and be broadcast as the second story of Season 16 - the Key to Time season.

Adams' starting point was an image of the Doctor being chased and jumping down through a trapdoor in the floor - only to discover that the planet he was visiting was hollow. When informed about the structure for Season 16, Adams wondered what would happen to the planets where the key segments were hidden. If was disguised as a continent, for instance, would there be a massive continent-shaped hole when it was removed? He had an idea about the Doctor going to a planet where new continents were made - the inspiration for the planet-building world of Magrathea in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The Doctor was to have visited a planet where everyone was very nice and polite, and in the centre of the main city was a huge statue of a Time Lord who had gone missing here many centuries ago. The spirit of this Time Lord, Malchios, was still alive, trapped within the statue, which absorbed all the hostility from the population - which was why they were so insufferably nice all the time. The planet had been rich in a mineral which the Time Lords used in TARDIS construction, and Malchios had mined out the entire centre of the planet to turn it into one vast TARDIS, which would time jump to Gallifrey and smother it, as he had felt abandoned by the Time Lords. The villain later changed to a space captain trapped in a pocket universe, and even the daughter of the Master, who was targeting planets where the Doctor had defeated her father.
Producer Graham Williams decided that he wanted to do a story about pirates, and felt that the Time Lords had featured too often recently. Adams duly changed his villain to a pirate captain, whose planet simply went round smothering other worlds in order to loot them of their mineral wealth - which is basically the story that we got to see.

Another of Adams' ideas which he managed to insert into The Pirate Planet was the notion of a business which sold Time. If your time was running out, the very wealthy could buy some more and so prolong their existence. This made it into the finished programme through the character of the aged Queen Xanxia, who is using the planets captured by the Captain to power Time Dams, which maintain her in the final moments of life. (The actress playing the decrepit Queen asked for extra money for taking her false teeth out - and was given it). As Read and Adams polished the script, the Captain became a more tragic figure, enslaved by Xanxia who was creating a new younger body for herself, and he was secretly working on a scheme to use the crushed remains of the planets to breach the Time Dams and destroy her.
Having gone from little work to getting a script commissioned for Doctor Who, Adams suddenly found that the BBC wanted to turn his Hitchhikers pilot idea into a full radio series. He had to work on both projects at the same time - prioritising Hitchhikers as it had the earliest deadline. (Adams famously said of deadlines that he liked them - "I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly past...").

So, what elements of pirate lore find their way into this story? Well, we have the Captain for a start, whose headquarters are referred to as "the Bridge". The Captain had been a feared space pirate but had been badly injured when his spaceship crashed on Calufrax. His body was repaired with cybernetic implants and attachments. These include a robotic arm with inbuilt gun - replacing the hook of Captain Hook or the spike of Captain Pike. He has an electronic eye - replacing the eye-patch of many a pirate - and he has a prosthetic leg, which replaces the peg-leg of Long John Silver.
For a pet he has a robotic bird of prey, the Polyphase Avatron - "Polly" reminding us of "Pretty Polly", which parrots are often said to say. The Polyphase Avatron was originally scripted to talk - saying "Pieces of Silicate", instead of "Pieces of Eight". The design of the bird was based on an archaic Greek warrior's helmet.
As a means of disposing of his enemies, the Captain either uses his pet, or he makes them walk the plank - falling from the Bridge which is built on top of a mountain. Two later Doctor Who stories with a Pirate theme have walking the plank as a threat to the Doctor or one of his companions - Enlightenment and Curse of the Black Spot. It should be mentioned that this is not the first time the programme has adopted pirates as the basis for a story. We had The Smugglers back in 1966, and then The Space Pirates in 1969.

In 2018 I watched reruns of the entire three series of Lost in Space. There was a story in the first season called The Sky Pirate (1966). This involved a space-going pirate, played by Albert Raimi, who had a robotic parrot. The character, Alonzo P. Tucker, returned the following year in Treasure of the Lost Planet.
I'd be surprised if Adams had never seen either of these episodes.
Adams came up with a lot of ideas, and he was never one to fail to capitalise on them. Many of the names, bits of dialogue, and concepts reappear in later works - especially later entries in the Hitchhikers series of novels. His unused movie idea, recently novelised, formed part of the third Hitchhikers book, for instance. There is mention of a planet called Bandraginus V, whilst the Pan Galactic Gargleblaster has an ingredient from a planet called Santraginus V. The Doctor tells his temporary companion Kimus "Don't Panic" at one point, and says to one of the Captain's guards "Standing around all day looking tough must be very wearing on the nerves" - a line which he then gave to Ford Prefect when addressing a Vogon guard.
The Pirate Planet made such an impression on fans that future writers will be tripping over themselves to reference it in later stories, or simply steal from it, as we'll see when we get to them.

One production story worth mentioning before we go. The Doctor bangs his face on the TARDIS console when first attempting to land on Calufrax. This scene was included to cover for the fact that Tom Baker had a visible scar on his upper lip from when Paul Seed's dog bit him during the making of the previous story. Its party piece was to snatch a sausage from someone's mouth.
Next time: Two down, four to go. It's back into Hammer Horror territory as we encounter human sacrifices, vampiric standing stones and pagan goddesses, with a sprinkling of Arthurian myth thrown in for good measure. The writer starts to take revenge on his aunties, and sausage sandwiches have never sounded so naughty...