The Underwater Menace
(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben, Polly and Jamie,14/1/1967-4/2/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Geoffrey Orme, director: Julia Smith)
Rank: 238
'So, before giving you the job as creator and all round scientist of
Atlantis where do you see yourself in five years, Professor Zaroff?'
'I shall be living
in Atlantis with a bunch of fish people vorking as my slaves and zen I shall
drain ze waters of ze Earth oceans and become controller of the entire world,
ahahahahahaha! I mean, I zee myself as a team player working for the company
and working my way up the corporate ladder. the ladder of...power wahahahahaha!
Wait, forget I just zed that.I am the greatest genius since Leonardo'
‘Da Vinci?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve
never Da Vinced. No Leonardo, he works on security.’
‘Oh, umm, well,
would these Fish people be cheap?’
‘They’d work for
scale. Wahahahaha!’
‘Well, you’re
clearly unstable, unreliable and prejudiced but you tick our ‘ethnic work box’
and you’re cheap. You’re hired!’
‘Terrific! Nothink
In Ze Vurld Can Shtop Me Now!’
By the great God Amdo, this might just be the weirdest story in this book. A book that, if you remember, contains a tale about a killer robot made of sweets (‘The Happiness Patrol’), a tale where everyone is a character out of a book (‘The Mind Robber’) and monsters made out of bogeys on a planet with talking tots (‘Space Babies’). A fun story mind you, a most watchable story after the earnestness of some of the more sombre Who stories out there but, blimey, does this one stand out from the rest of the catalogue like a sore fish. It’s also a story that almost no one wanted to be made (not the production team who pushed hard to do another story that kept falling through, not the original director Hugh David who gave the script to a friend who pointed out that do this four-parter properly would cost more than Dr Who could afford for a year, not replacement director Julia Smith who broke down in tears trying to get this story made, not the cast who were openly critical and made sure they never got a script this bad again. It’s a crazy unfeasible unrealistic story that would be fishy even if it didn’t feature a race of fish people, that would be colossally stupid if it didn’t try to claim the lost continent of Atlantis still existed underwater in the near-present day and which would look ridiculous even if everyone was wearing sensible clothes, rather than shell suits made of, umm, shells. Even in a series with a format as elastic as Dr Who’s ‘The Underwater Menace’ doesn’t just bend the rules, it all but breaks it. One of those stories that’s a bit, well, fishy.
It’s not that ‘The
Underwater Menace’ is bad as such, just that it’s clearly written by someone
who’s never seen ‘Dr Who’ before and with time pressing on a quick editing job
was never going to make this story fall in line. You have to wonder if instead
Orme knew Dr Who from the pages of ‘TV Comic’, where the Doctor’s exciting
adventures had started off at a tangent from the series and by 1967 were
running in complete contrast. The 2nd Doctor had a belt full of
gadgets he used to outwit his enemies in lots of increasingly bloodthirsty
ways. Free of the need to write for a ‘family’ audience where adults might be
watching it had become increasingly juvenile, with lots of recycled plots (in
the hopes that the kiddies hadn’t seen the real thing yet) and stories that
felt made up as they went along, pure fiction without the science (even though
almost all children preferred the ‘adult’ feel of the TV show and wished the
comic resembled it more). After all, in this story Professor Zaroff is a comedy
baddy with an Eastern accent (Polish in the script, though really it’s actor
Joseph Furst exaggerating his natural German accent he took on and off for
roles) living on an imaginary island under the sea full of people he’s
converting into fish and using as slaves for his masterplan to bore a hle
through the Earth’s crust and break the world in half. There’s no rationale for his behaviour, no greater
sense of political struggle, no backstory that explains how he got here like
The Daleks or The Cybermen (though there was a line cut that said Zaroff lost
his wife and either his mum or child depending on the source, after a car
accident. No doubt into a tanker carrying fish fingers: it’s that sort of a
script!) Zaroff has to be defeated because he’s mad, end of, apparently never
stopping to see that his grand plan will kill him too. The Doctor seems to
think his surname actually is ‘Who’ too, just like the comics, signing a note
to Zaroff ‘Dr W’ (due to a misunderstanding by producer Innes Lloyd that no one
corrected – and mercifully no one copied – though it crops up a few times in
his era, alongside ‘The War Machines’
and ‘The Highlanders’).
There’s also a lot of dressing up in funny costumes (something the TV Comic
artists often did to break the monotony) and a set of superstitious locals
fooled into thinking someone using a funny voice is their God (as used in so
many comics. Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers did this every other week. In fact
‘The Underwater Menace’ is a Chip ‘n’ Dale script in every way except for the
Tardis team being Humans not rodents: The Doctor is Chip with all the good
ideas no one listens to, Ben is Monterey Jack blustering into action, Polly is
Gadget trying to come up with all the ideas but really there to get captured
and be rescued while Jamie is Dale, the comedy relief). There’s even a most
puzzling opening, unlike anything else in the series before or since, where we
hear the thoughts of the companions as if there are thought bubbles coming out
of their heads, wondering where the Tardis might have landed this time (they’re
all very revealing for their characters: Polly wants to go home via the
fashionable boutqiues of ‘Chelsea, 1966’, The Doctor longs for ‘prehistoric
monsters’ suggesting he’s heads rumours of ‘The
Silurians’ already, Ben doesn’t care as long as he doesn’t meet The Daleks
again and only Jamie has the natural everyday response ‘What have I come
upon?!’) Oh and there’s lots of innocent people die at the end at The Doctor’s
hand (no seriously: he stops Zaroff by flooding Atlantis and whole the fish
people might well escape the Atlanteans don’t, even though many of them have
just helped him. This might just be the biggest amount of Human blood on the
Doctor’s hands directly in the entire series, assuming for the moment they are
Humans and not an alien race). But
you’re not meant to focus on the death and devastation because it’s just a
cartoon.
Or maybe Orme caught
Terry Nation or Dennis Spooner’s name on the credits and assumed Dr Who was
more like a Gerry Anderson series? At the time of broadcast ‘Stingray’ had just
been a big hit and there are vast similarities with this story: the fish people
are mermaid-like and mute just like Marina, the ‘heroes’ are all square-jawed
and run around giving big speeches (even Ben and Jamie to an extent), the girls
are there to get captured, there’s an enemy in an underwater lair filled with
seashells and the acting is, well, wooden. The plot is straight out of a
‘Stingray’ plot, with Atlantis in the middle of nowhere (somewhere deep in the
Atlantic ‘south of the ridge’ between 30º and 40º North and West, whatever that
might mean – the About Time books put it somewhere between Bermuda and Angola)
and inhabited by fish people (just like Stingray’s underwater city Hydroma,
where baddy Titan lives). No one has ever found it and it’s hidden in the entrance
to a cave…which Polly just happens to stumble on within approximately two
minutes of the Tardis landing (just as Stingray always does). Growing up in
isolation also means the locals have distinctly dodgy dress senses, especially
the all-too-literal shellsuits (poor Anneke Wills spent the whole story bruised
black and blue!) There’s also a fight scene with sort of cardboard ‘rock’
Anderson characters used every week. They even have fish people on kirby wires
at one stage as if they, too, are puppets.
Then again it’s also
quite like a Bond film. Fans of that franchise know Joseph Furst well, as the
OTT histrionic baddy threatening to blow up the world in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’
as Blofeld’s supposedly ‘genius’ assistant (although he’s even more OTT here). Zaroff
is, like many a baddy in the spy franchise where the British and Americans are
always the good guys, clearly based on a Nazi who escaped justice after the war
and ran away to the other side of the world (only instead of South America he
went underground). He even talks with a German aczunt that no real life Germans
have ever used. His plan sounds exactly like the sort of thing 007 would be
called in to put right and even Doctor 002 is a lot more of an action hero than
he usually is, taking action rather than outwitting his opponent (The Doctor
says Zaroff is the ‘greatest mind since Leonardo’ but is buttering him up at
the time and never says Leonardo who. Given the state of Zaroff’s plans he
might have meant Di Caprio). The plan to destroy the Earth with a big machine
is straight out of the Bond handbook, especially the way the plan involves
using a big volcano by using steam to melt the sea (even The Master never came
up with a plan quite that daft!) What’s more, while Dr Who is a series that
often hints at the cold war and uses metaphors to sum up the American-Russian
divide this is one of the few stories that actually comes out and mentions it
head on (even though it’s a rare 1960s story that isn’t actually about the cold
war at all. Apparently both sides blame Zaroff’s disappearance on each other
and it nearly leads to WWIII). Even the title sounds more like a Bond title
than a Dr who one (there’s no mention of ‘doom’ or ‘Daleks’ or ‘Invasion’ or
‘time’!) and it’s easy to imagine some B list entity singing it (maybe Astrid
as played by Kylie Minogue from ‘Voyage Of The
Damned’?!) Mostly, though, it’s a
big action blockbuster made on a Dr Who budget, which of course means lots of
escaping and capturing and a brief bit of filming in Dorset alongside filming
in a cramped TV studio rather than an epic chase scene across a vast
wilderness. Whatever it is, it’s not Dr Who.
Then again, the deficit
to a Bond film maybe isn’t as big as you might expect. The departments that
come out of this story with the most credit by far are the set designers and
propsmen. Director Julia Smith took the, for 1967, unique idea of recording
this story in ‘set’ order rather than ‘plot’ order, which gives her more
opportunity to have big sets built and then struck down when they’re no longer
needed (the Tardis scenes in episode four, for instance, were filmed alongside
those for episode one). So we get ginormous sets the likes of which we’ve only
ever seen in historical stories but are now here in a futuristic one that looks
unlike anything ever seen in the series. Set designer Jack Robinson and his team have clearly worked his socks
off and spent longer than thirteen days on this: there’s a big market square
complete with massive working fountains (filled with, erm, corrosive salt water
– probably best not to think that through too much!), a ginormous cog that
towers over the cast (only seen in episode four so all we have left of it are
stills, sadly), a ‘box cage’ lift with
back projections to make it look as if it’s really moving (it’s hard to tell
with stills whether it’s effective or not but every other set in this story ‘works’
so why not?), a temple that looks a lot better than a lot of Who temple sets do,
a mining cave that properly looks the part for once and a giant seesaw used to
‘punish’ prisoners in an elaborate Bond villain type way, where the water moves
slowly over time so the hapless victim can see themselves about to be thrown to
a pool of (stock footage) sharks (sadly not even stills of this seem to have
survived but those who remember this story think it the best set of all). Yes
this is the BBC so they all look a bit bashed up and a bit too obviously put
together, but there’s an ambition here that’s been missing in the sets for some
time (since Ray Cusick stopped working so regularly). What’s more, they’ve
risked using water in the sets for the first time, usually a no-no with all
that electrical equipment (and learn about what went wrong in ‘Battlefield’ for why it’s with good
reason!) The studio sets even tie in neatly with the location filming at
Swanage – Portland Bill in fact, the only coastline to have a children’s TV
series named after it (think ‘The Horror Of
Fang Rock’ without the rutan turning up in the middle). It’s all part of
producer Innes Lloyd’s move to make Dr Who look better, as this is the third
story with extensive location filming out of five and – give or take bits we can’t
see in ‘The Smugglers’ arguably the best. While I suspect this story
isn't high on anyone's dream returned missing episodes list, it's a particular
shame that only half this story exists as its one you really need to see, not
just hear. The brief 'censor' clip from episode four where Zaroff 'drowns' is a
real production tour de force as they actually do the unthinkable and flood the
set!
Indeed the return of
episode two has cast a different light on this story. For decades all we had to
go on was the silliest, episode three (kept in the archives, remarkably,
because the ‘fish ballet’ scene in the middle was thought to be of ‘importance’
as an ‘example of Dr Who at its best’. Remember this is the story before an
actual example of Who near its best with ‘The Moonbase’ was wiped) even though
it’s obvious the extras are wearing leotards and swimming goggles with shells
stuck on them, suspended from kirby wires that the camera doesn’t try to avoid
but gives whacking great big close ups to (not forgetting Dudley Simpson’s
weirdest score, which sounds like a robot yodelling into a cement mixer
underwater. Which is still preferable to the constant chanting by special
guests The Cliff Adams Singers). It’s the episode where Zaroff is at his most
exaggerated (clearly the director told him to reign it in a bit for episode
four where Furst is marginally more self-contained and much more of a threat)
and where we get a pantomime type runaround that has Zaroff chasing the others
and ending when The Doctor uses his recorder to puff pepper in his face and
blind him. Episode two, an Australian copy returned by a film collector in 2011
(the first since an episode of ‘The
Dalek’s Masterplan’ twelve years earlier, but without anything like the
fuss or trolling against the BBC as when Phillip Morris overshadowed it with
his return of ‘Enemy Of The World’ and ‘The Web Of Fear’ a couple of years later), is
quite the revelation though: it’s still silly but in a darker way, the Doctor
trying to ‘make’ Zaroff mad and goad him into giving up his plans, while his
underlings stand around and worry about whether they were right to hand so much
power to one man (clue: they weren’t). I suspect that, were they found, the
visual heavy but creepy episode one and the more desperate finale when things
could go either way would be better regarded still. It’s also I think fair to say
that what always seemed an unlikeable story of an obvious mentally insane man
brought to power on the back of technological fraud everyone should have seen
through straight away hits differently in 2025 (if ‘The Underwater Menace’ was
in colour you’d bet Zaroff would be orange).
It’s a shame that this
one episode had coloured our views for so long – and yet had one of the other
episodes been discovered first this would still be seen as a very silly story. It
seems wrong to say that a story set in Atlantis and populated by a mad
professor and a set of fish people is even weirder than it sounds, but it is.
Usually in Dr Who there’s some plausible science to get your teeth into, some
sense that however unlikely it seems a story can be plausible, but this one just
isn’t anywhere. It’s not just ther
stupidity of the ain plot, although that is super silly. At least when The
Daleks had the notion of flying The Earth around like a plane (‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’) though there was a
strong enough plot going on to distract you – ditto The master’s plan to take
over the world using mathematics in ‘Logopolis’, which is played absolutely
straight as a tense thriller. This one?
It’s a lark without any basis in reality whatsoever. Take Atlantis
itself: at least when ‘The Time Monster’ did the same thing they had an entire
culture set that rang true, ‘like us but not like us’, in the distant past
thousands of years ago, destroyed in a Master-caused eruption that leaves no
survivors. In this story Atlanteans grew up separately to other Humans, cut off
by the Atlantic sea apart from the odd shipwreck, but still speak much the same
language (even without the Tardis translator, which isn’t a thing yet) and have
a culture virtually identical. This isn’t in the dim and distant past either:
‘The Underwater Menace’ is arguably the first Who story set in the ‘near
future’ shortly after broadcast (give or take whether
‘The War Machines’ is meant to be happening the actual week of transmission
or not). It’s never explained how Polly comes across a pamphlet for the Mexico
Olympics in 1968 (it seems an odd thing for a stranded fisherman to be
carrying, though it’s a nice thought that maybe the fish people were hoping to
enter the synchronised swimming). This story seriously expects the audience
sitting at home in 1967 to think that Atlantis is out there somewhere right
‘now’. No wonder the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks production team, usually so
good at continuity, forgot about this story when writing their own version of
Atlantis’ and no, sadly, they’re not the same – not unless The Master’s
disruption eruption somehow blew them halfway across the Earth (you’d think a)
someone would notice and b) no way would it had have been repopulated by
‘survivors living in air pockets’. Not unless they had enough fish to survive
for generations and a working cooker anyway. Oh and Letts/Dicks seemed to have
a bit of amnesia relating to Atlantis anyway, forgetting they’d already mentioned
demon Azaal blowing it up in ‘The Daemons’.
All three can’t be right, surely? Although an in-joke on a UNIT file spotted in
‘The Magician’s Apprentice’
suggests that actually they are true! Odd that nobody just went with doing the ‘other’
lost continent ‘Mu’ though, which seems far more likely to have existed, historically
speaking).
Atlantis also seems a
most unlikely mixture of superstition and technology. In many ways the Atlanteans
are just The Aztecs but underwater rather than up in the air, with a
civilisation capable of great beauty but also great savagery, with most of
their decorations reserved for their God Amdo who is given regular ‘sacrifices’
to make sure there an abundant amount of fish and elaborate decorations (it’s
hard to tell in black and white but we’re clearly meant to think they’re
sparkling like gold). Yet these people also have the ability to provide Zaroff
with a laboratory full of great big whacking flashing machines that look like
WOTAN (and might well be recycled parts of the same prop). Where do they get
the electricity from if this place runs on water? Did Zaroff, who by all
accounts ended up here by accident, come with a load of technology in his boat despite
being an expert not in physics so much as biology (it’s food he was famous for
before he disappeared – and his fame must have spread hugely for him to be this
famous within possibly a year of transmission, give or take how old the
Olympics poster is). And if he did surely it would be more use to him to build
a whacking boat and return to safety and then come back to Atlantis when he’s
more prepared? It’s a mad, weird plan. But then Professor Zaroff is a weird,
mad man who makes Davros look positively sane. He's the sort of man who rolls
his 'r's while rolling his eyes even when he's reading out his grocery list, who
can't walk into a room without making a song and dance about it, never mind
make speeches about destroying the Earth when he’s supposed to be keeping his
plan quiet and who makes out that he has mastery over a sea which has made hi a
prisoner along with everyone else in Atlantis. He also has a pet octopus. The
title has it right: he isn’t a scientific genius on a par with The Doctor, as
the script would have it – just a fake scientists full of ego compared to The
Doctor’s real knowledge. It’s never an even contest (despite The Doctor
uncharacteristically making a bit of a meal out of it, it has to be said)Zaroff’s
not the big bad you really believe can destroy the Earth so much as a menace,
an irritant who only has a rebellious slave force (literally) green around the
gills to defend him and who’s easily defeated. We never do learn Zaroff’s first
name but it would be in keeping with the comic book motif if somehow it was ‘Dennis’
being a menace. Like I say, this is a TV Comic strip that accidentally got
turned into a TV story, or possibly a Stingray submission without knowing Gerry
Anderson had moved on to the more universal but less distinctive or interesting
‘Thunderbirds’, or maybe Orme sent this in to Cubby Broccoli to be made as a
Bond film and they laughed in his face, who knows?
The fish people don’t
make a lick of sense either, even though they’re by far the closest thing to
what would be seen in a ‘normal’ Who story. They’re an oppressed slave race who
used to be Human but were somehow turned into fish by Zaroff’s inventions and
enslaved to collect plankton (as opposed to, y’know, inventing a fishing net), even
though to date his background has been in food not biological experiments.
They’re a bit green around the gills and I can’t say I blame them: remember
they used to be fishermen, shipwrecked sailors who ended up here by accident
who have had their lungs removed and replaced with gills and a tail. They’re
doomed to do Zaroff’s evil plan and harvest fish underwater and stare out at
the rest of the world with big accusing
eyes. They live a horrible miserable life and in any other Dr Who story this
would be about their escape and rescue, of The Doctor undoing the work of the
‘evil genius’ and the audience made to sympathise with their suffering. There’s
even a half-hearted Dr Who ‘theme’ of capitalist slavery: they’re wage-slaves
basically, forced to working hard in return for some shiny shells and the
chance to eat a fraction of the food they produce. The end of episode three
sees a Doctory plan to make them go ‘on strike’ – but it’s not very Doctory to
think that presumably they all perish (or that they’re too thick to have worked
this out before. Or indeed that Zaroff’s to thick to think this one through
either. So you’re telling me he can bore a hole through the Earth that will
split it in two with steam but he can’t build a basic fridge?!) But Orme doesn’t
care about them really, they’re just a background detail, the closest he can
get to that pesky ‘monster’ Davies and Lloyd keep asking him for to make it
more ‘Dr Who’ like. They’re not even proper mermaids, which would be the
obvious thing to do (with a myth about how every mermaid in every legend is
really a fish person: that’s what every other Dr Who story worth its fish
sticks would do). There’s a moment when
poor Polly is nearly turned into one when you’re made to sympathise with their
plight before the electricity goes out in the resolution inside the next
episode (by far the cleverest scene
here, as it sets up our first impression of Zaroff beyond being a
‘foodie’ and that Atlantis is struggling with power because of Zaroff’s future
machine) but even that is clumsily handled. So clumsily handled that it
received the first serious complaint the production team ever had (from N
Safford on behalf of The National Society For The Welfare Of Children In
Hospitals’ Society, who was, understandably, worried that every child due for
an injection after transmission would assume they were being turned into a
fish. An anxious producer tied himself up in knots trying to explain that as it
was a ‘fantastical’ setting a child would be able to tell the two apart, something
which explains a lot about how he saw Dr Who as going in a different direction
to his predecessors who were adamant Who had to seem ‘possible’, not escapist
fiction. Although legend has it that this only made children more likely to
want to go).
Usually when DW goes wild
and wacky the Tardis regulars are our root to sanity but this story is pretty
much unique in making them seem just as wild and strange - particularly the 2nd
Doctor whose best described as 'manic'. Nobody in the production team seemed to
know quite what to do with his Doctor in the early days except to make him
different to the 1st, which means airy and mercurial to Hartnell’s stable earth
and fire. In 1st story 'Power Of The Daleks'
this unpredictable Doctor works because the Dalek threat was so serious and
well drawn. It kind of worked in 2nd story 'The
Highlanders' because the tale of the Jacobites is so dark and grim (even if
that's not always shown on screen) that The Doctor ends up as comic interlude
as well as our link to safety because he isn’t taking any of this seriously. In
this 3rd story, though, the clowning gets out of hand: The Doctor is
treated as a reckless eccentric Uncle and you don’t get the feeling, as you
will later, that it’s all an act, that he’s smarter and if need be more
ruthless than Zaroff could ever dream of being. You don’t quite trust The
Doctor to save the day, which in some stories would be a good thing but this
story has such a weak and unlikely plot that it ought to be child’s play for
him. Troughton instinctively knew this and reportedly had lots of blazing
standup rows about making his Doctor darker and more serious, which the
director kept pooh-poohing; Troughton was right as you’ll see from 4th
story ‘The Moonbase’ when a more
experienced director, Morris Barry, helps him develop it (and allows him to
drop his hated stovepipe hat at long last – it’s last seen here in episode
four, when Polly is wearing it). Adding Jamie to the script last minute last
week means he gets half of Ben’s lines, which doesn’t do either of them any
favours: Ben barely gets a word in edgeways anyway and balancing his more
gung-ho but sarcastic approach with Jamie’s laidback but loyal style means that
for a lot of the time at least one of them will be acting out of character for
a lot of the time. It’s all done so clumsily too: no way would Jamie risk his
life to save Polly by following a mad Zaroff the way Ben would, while no way
would Ben have enough brain capacity to ‘stick to the plan’ worrying about his
Duchess. As for Polly, this is her at her wettest no pun intended. Usually she’s the sort of
companion who screams in the moment and hangs around to be rescued, but puts
that time to good use coming up with a plan of how to defeat the monster. Not
here: she blubbers about getting lost in a cave, blubbers about being turned
into a fish, blubbers when The Doctor’s plan starts to go wrong and blubbers
when she thinks The Doctor is dead. All
very natural and understandable (it might well be the most realistic moment of
the whole story) but there are no true ‘Polly’ moments where she shines and she
also suffers the ignominy of being slapped by Jamie for being hysterical at one
point! Still, The 2nd Dr, Ben, Polly and Jamie family unit are so good they’re
still one of the best things about the serial and I could gladly watch them all
day. Even when surrounded by ballet dancing fish people.
As for the supporting
cast, only Tom Watson as the noble Ramo shines (even if he’s clearly just a
less interesting version of Autloc from ‘The Aztecs’) while Catherine Howe as Ara
is the most likeable part, the ‘resistance’ leader who risks her life to
constantly get everyone out of danger – even when she must be despairing at The
Doctor’s plan for getting them back in it all over again! As for the rest it’s
a measure of how daft this story is that Peter Stephens gets his dafter and
dafter looking Who dressed role as Temple priest Lolem when his other role is
Billy Bunter in ‘The Celestial Toymaker’. Noel Johnson, playing King Thous was
arguably a bigger name than Furst at the time after playing ‘Dick Barton – Special
Agent’ on the radio, but his part is too small and too one-dimensional for him
to make much of an impact. P G Stephens plays Sean as if he’s the sort of
stereotypical Irishman caricature that hasn’t been around for 300 years, even
though he must have been shipwrecked at some time in the 1960s. As for Furst,
he’s awful: he got this story on the back of his reputation for brooding menace
(He’s pretty decent in the next series Gerry Davies worked on with him,
‘Doomwatch’) so to see him over-act and go so OTT and mug every line for all
its worth is reprehensible and someone should have nipped this in the bud (it’s
arguably the first instance of ‘Dr Who acting’ in the show, an actor using the
show as a ‘busman’s holiday’ to spoof and parody: this will be the de facto way
of doing the show in twenty years’ time, sadly). Sometimes the cast go over the
top when they’re having a good time but by all accounts Furst made himself a
pest by coming with airs and graces and sending everything the production team
had worked so hard to build up. There are times when even a cool head like
Patrick Troughton looks as if he wants to smack the actor round the chops with
a wet fish.
It’s truly shocking that
something so bad as this made it to air. Surely ‘The Imps’ couldn’t possibly
have been worse than this idea, or harder to make than a set with a working
sluice that gets flooded? There’s nothing in this story to properly get your
teeth into, no realism to hold on to, no sense in the plot to get worked up
about, no characters to cheer on, no bigger sense of hidden metaphors that
shine a light on the present day of the viewers, no great statement to make.
‘The Underwater Menace’ was purely made to be entertainment . But here’s the
weird thing about this story: it is entertaining if you come to this without a
critical eye. I mean, I’d hate every Dr Who story to end up like this and if
they’d copied this as the template for stories to come rather than ‘The Moonbase’ Dr Who would have died
an unglorious death in the 1960s. But as a one-off? It’s watchable. What’s
going on long-term across the story is a load of old Nimon bull, but taken
scene by scene it’s sprightly, entertaining. So many of the stories across
season four have been padded out to the point where they’re wearing more layers
than an Abzorbaloff, but this one really zips along from set piece to set
piece. You could never ever accuse this story of being boring – if anything it
tries too hard. It’s only afterwards you realise ‘hang on, we’re not even in
the same universe as logic here’. And yes the dialogue is some of the worst in
the series, but even that’s pretty quotable. There’s a great line when Ben’s
being questioned taking a captured Doctor with him as part of a ruse ‘Well
blimey look at him. He ain’t normal is he?!’ and the most Polly-ish line ever
‘Please don’t let them turn me into a fish!’ The main idea too isn’t that bad: as
a half-bit of history (see ‘The Time Monster’) ‘Atlantis’ is perfect for a Who
story, it just needed a writer to turn it into a dark gloomy cold war parable
with a sign of what happens when someone presses the ‘wrong’ button and an
emphasis on societies giving all their power away to madmen rather than fish
people ballets. After all, we still know more about outer space than the
deepest part of our oceans: had Atlantis been buried on the seafloor and really
impossible to get to it might have even made for a semi-plausible story. Alas,
we get what we get. I would never say that ‘The Underwater Menace’ is a work of
art, a good or even okay set of Dr Who episodes and it pales in comparison to ‘The Time Monster’ in depicting Atlantis
(an idea that ought to be right in Dr Who’s wheelhouse), but if I was stranded
on a desert island in the middle of the Atlantic with only fish people for
company and this was my only Dr Who copy I wouldn’t be too upset. This is a
story everyone knows is a minnow in what’s usually a pool of sharks and they
treat it as such, realising that it’s a red herring of a type they’ll never
bother having to make again. Just treat it as a bit off end of term
silliness (even if it’s slap bang in the middle of a season) rather than a
proper story and leave it at that. Needless to say Geoffrey Orme and Joseph
Furst were never invited back to the series again…
POSITIVES + While some
of the budget has been questionably spent, particularly the fish people's
stick-on gills and Joseph Furst's dialect coach, otherwise this story is
lavish. Perhaps best of all is the sheer amount of filming at the bigger
studios at Ealing, usually a luxury Who only used sparingly but not here where
they fill a tank with eight fish people extras. Not only are they shown
‘swimming’ at great length in surely one of the weirdest scenes in the history
of the show and chucking shells, they also filmed lots of ‘extra’ bits of
material where they gawp at the camera and make fools of themselves. They then
build a giant monitor into the set back at BBC TV Centre and replay the film
which makes it look as if we’re gazing at them through a giant fishtank. For
1967 television films this is downright revolutionary and a luxury ‘extra’ the
show couldn’t normally afford. Actually nor could this one: it sailed £2200
over budget, making it – accounting for inflation – the most expensive serial
until ‘The TV Movie’ nineteen years
later and meaning that other, better, stories across the rest of 1967 needed to
save money.
Previous ‘The
Highlanders’ next ‘The Moonbase’
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