We sat through an LC recon.
Man, this is boring.
It's not hard to figure out why.
Incredibly incredulous. The 'pretence' that Polly is a boy is just **strange**. Moreover, there are no women in the pirate ships, the church, the inn. The Squire does not meet or talk with any women. This is a very odd community.
The plot is finding some lost treasure or denying various wild allegations of suspicion of crimes.
And avoiding either the 'revenue men' (the cops), the squire (the maybe good guys) or the pirates/smugglers (either "sus" trying to make good (Pike) or actually homicidal (Cherub) ).
Hartnell seems well enough in his scenes in the studio but he is noticeably absent from the location work. When this was made (end of Series 3) was actually before he would have known he was on the way out, so he's being professional.
A major problem with the story is the fluff by Terence De Marney (as the Churchwarden in ep1) over the names which constitute the clues to finding Avery's treasure. Hartnell gets the 3 names right in ep4. ("Ringwood, Smallbeer and Gurney".) So the old pro has **not** made a fluff here.
The surviving censored clips indicate that the death scenes of most of the major characters (Churchwarden, Kewper, Pike, Cherub) were chopped out of what was presented (at least in Australia) so it must have seemed confusing as well as boring.
The characters are cardboard-y and cliched. There's no cosmic baddie, there's no SF idea or fantasy element at all and worse for a historical there's no depiction of a famous or notable historical character or event. It seems difficult to work out why this was made as a DW story. It could be a dull serial of any kind. Ben getting his shirt off does not compete with Aidan Turner scythe reaping in Poldark.
It's hard to tell what kind of nasty race based trope the character of Jamaica is. He has no lines in a telesnaps serial and is murdered horribly by Pike. I guess the tragedy of his murder underlines the black hearted true nature of the evil Captain Samuel Pike so it serves the drama a bit (but only at a pantomime level.). Make him a character for gawd's sakes!
There's 39 seconds of silent 8mm colour home movie footage (on the Lost in Time DVD) which has **more** entertainment value than the whole 4 episodes.
This story is like The Gunfighters without the silly song. Only the 'pirates' (having maybe ended in cinematic popularity sorta mid 50's) are even more out of date than cowboys.
Actually it's worse because there's no attempted corny jokes....
The UK ratings average for the 4 Smuggly episodes (4.5 million) is the lowest for DW till Trial of a Time Lord in 1986.
I looked up this site...
www.broadwcast.org #sellingthedoctor
http://gallifreybase.com/w/index.php/William_Hartnell_stories#WILLIAM_HARTNELL
It says The Smugglers premiered in Brisbane in May 1967 and was repeated in May 1968. Last screening anywhere in Australia was June 1968. It was only ever shown in 6 countries.
| Australia | May 67 | b/w |
| Barbados | Jun 68 | b/w |
| Zambia | Oct 68 | b/w |
| New Zealand | Jul 69 | b/w |
| Sierra Leone | Sep 70 | b/w |
| Singapore | Mar 72 | b/w |
Australia's films were definitely sent back to England in 4 June 1975 where they were skipped (along with many other 60's ep all in one go... set your time machine for this space-time event to make a rescue of missing eps!)
(According to Paul Vanezis.... The following were sent back on June 4th 1975 (with thanks to Damian Shanahan for the research):
The Space Museum, The Chase, The Time Meddler, Galaxy Four, The Myth Makers, The Ark, The Smugglers, The Tenth Planet, The Power of the Daleks, The Underwater Menace, The Moonbase, The Faceless Ones, The Evil of the Daleks, The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Abominable Snowmen, The Ice Warriors, The Enemy of the World, The Web of Fear, The Dominators, The Mind Robber, The Invasion, The Seeds of Death, The Space Pirates, The War Games
The Krotons was returned in June 1976.)
NZ's Smugglers were likely supplied from Australian copies and then sent to Singapore. Barbados copies maybe went to Zambia then Sierra Leone and were returned to London in 1974 (or if they weren't the SLTV station was destroyed in one of several wars in the late 70's.)
There's a good chance The Smugglers will stay lost.
According to the site Serial 2C was the last of Group F in First Doctor sales terms. The next few groups after this were hardly shown overseas. Only 3 countries ever took Tenth Planet. By this time (later half of 1966) the Terry Nation rights sales embargo problem with Daleks asserted itself in two ways. DW stopped making new Dalek stories at the end of Series 4 (there was about a 6 month lead time on commissioning and writing new scripts at this time) and Dalek serials overseas were sold separately by BBC Enterprises, presumably at higher 'Terry' prices.
Masterplan was never shown overseas, Power in just Australia, NZ and Singapore and Evil in just 4 countries (and frequently out of order.)
It's gonna be 5 years before we see Daleks on DW after series 4.
After an initial burst of international distribution many countries were going cold on DW by this stage.
The distribution of missing episodes in the archives is reflected by international sales distribution (with a couple of minor variations...)
International sales would build slowly again from here to the peaks of the late 70's and early 80's when 200 PBS stations in the USA were buying every ep they could get and plenty of repeats...
HALF WAY
Episode 1 of this serial is number 127. Which is exactly half way to 253.So we're half way through the B&W's.
After this serial it's 130 down (inc. 43 missing episodes with 4 animated).
In the remaining 123 to go there are 54 missing episodes (14 are animated.)
And episode 2 is my "birthday" episode... first broadcast (in UK) 17 September 1966.
ABM Rating 1.90/4.00
LJM Rating 0.75/5.00
SPJ Rating 1.75/10.00
No. 27 (out of 28)
Link to Cumulative Rankings
Rankings Scoreboard
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