Fury From The Deep
(Season 5, Dr 2 with Jamie and Victoria, 16/3/1968-20/4/1968, producer: Peter Bryant, writer: Victor Pemberton, director: Hugh David)
Rank: 126
'Well, that's just great Doctor. It's all very well defeating a sentient monster made of seaweed and I'm very pleased it's kept us alive down here underwater with oxygen to breathe while it learns about humanity, but now you've gone and killed it how are we supposed to get out now? I mean, submersibles are dangerous at this depth in 2023, never mind 55 years ago. And what is all that screaming going on up there? And all the foam? And what do you mean you expect me to lay on a slap up meal for all the survivors when I’m still suffering from trauma of nearly drowning? And that the person screaming wants me as a foster mum?!? On second thoughts perhaps I should stay down here…’
And yet the three-odd minutes that have survived out of the 150 (half of those behind-the-scenes footage) do point a little as to why this story is as loved as it was. Clearly a lot of money was spent on it, with oodles of location filming back when such a thing was quite rare that manage the rare achievement of making Kent seem exciting. Botony Bay near Kingsgate to be exact, with a good half of the first episode filmed there before we move on to an actual oil rig Red Sands Sea Fort about eight miles off the coast of Whitstable where most of the next four were filmed. Very few companies had ever allowed Dr ho onto their premises before and even those that had been brave enough, like Gatwick airport in ‘The Faceless Ones’ or the London of ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ had been recorded on the fly, in a few crammed days here and there. The oil rig, though, had been shut down for Winter so the BBC had time to film as much as they wanted across February before the workers came back in again and – if the telesnaps and animation are anything to go by – really made the most of it. That final episode is hardly hard done by in the effects department too, with a real live helicopter (one Patrick Troughton refused to get in after he saw the pilot, known as ‘Mad’ Mike Smith which really should have been a clue in itself not to hire him, drunk the night before take off and Barry Smith was hired as a body double. The helicopter duly came close to crashing into the cliffs the next day, causing Debbie Watling to scream for real. Despite that Debbie dated him later after leaving the series and was alarmed when he started eating the glasses on their date, calling it his ‘party trick’) and twenty minutes of madness with the foam machine. Even the bits in between are unusual territory for 20th century Who: the scariest moments of all happen not out at sea ort in space somewhere but in an ordinary (and very 1960s) kitchen, with this the closest Who had dared to come in the heavily censored days of having the monsters attack humans in their own homes. We know that the Doctor can fight off monsters on a space station using alien gadgetry, but Jamie fighting off seaweed in a kitchen is new. This story looks like nothing else the series had ever done before and seeing the bits and pieces we have suggests that the scariest, most memorable moments would have been the slow lingering ones of brainwashed people slowly drowning calmly or killing people by alien halitosis (scarier than it sounds) which just sound like empty silence on the soundtrack. There’s a grandeur about this one that few other stories have, a feeling of ordinary things becoming extraordinary, the frisson of this being only our fifth ever visit to contemporary Britain (after ‘An Unearthly Child’ ‘The war machines’ ‘The Faceless Ones’ and the first episode of ‘Evil Of The Daleks’) and seeing Earth at a different angle to all the others, from the point of view of the sea. It’s just a real shame that most of what sound like the best bits can’t be seen anymore.
Even with what’s left, though, there are some real strengths to this story and the lack of a talking monster taking up half the plot leaves us with lots of really human moments between the, well, humans. There’s a half-theme running through this story of the importance of home, of what you’ll sacrifice in order to keep your loved ones safe (which is why that invasion of the Harrises’ kitchen is so shocking). With the seaweed left off to the side for much of the plot the main drama comes in the fight between the kindly Harrises who take the Doctor’s side and base commander Robson, who disagree over their work-life balance: even before he gets taken over by the seaweed Robson (played with gusto by Victor Maddern) is a monster who can’t see the bigger picture in front of his face that’s more than his profit margins, an early prototype for the authority figures the 3rd Doctor will clash with in a couple of years’ time. For him the job is everything; for the sweeter, gentler Harris (Roy Spencer) it’s a means to support his family and nothing more, so when he thinks his wife has died he finally stands up to his evil boss. You almost don’t need the Tardis crew there to tell this story, with the 2nd Doctor much happier staying in the shadows and letting plots unfold than the 3rd will be, but even there you feel the tension. This is one of those rare stories where a companion handed in their notice early and was taken seriously enough to be properly written out of the series and it’s a sensible jumping off point for Victoria. She wants a simple, quieter life after another six episodes spent miserably sobbing and fighting for survival, deciding to stay behind - in a first for Dr Who - not to unite a broken civilisation, or to fall in love or through a noble heroic death saving others, but because she’s had enough of all the travelling and danger and wants a rest and security. Jamie doesn’t understand it at all: he loves this life and is loyal to a fault (when he finally leaves, in ‘The War Games’, it’s not by his choice but by timelord intervention) and thinks Victoria is mad to want to give up the opportunity of a lifetime. But Victoria came along because the Doctor and Jamie were her substitute family following the events in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ and she had no one else to keep her safe. The Harrises have been shown across the story to be the epitome of family values so you can see why their quiet dignified reliability should appeal so much to someone who, in the past few weeks, has been kidnapped, shot at and possessed more times for comfort even by Dr Who standards. Really, she’s just worn out: it might not be the best Dr Who leaving scenario but it’s the most honest and fitting somehow. How a prim Victorian girl copes in a time thought to be contemporary with the 1968 broadcast is another matter, but it’s really well handled, with Jamie beyond distraught and the Doctor quietly understanding, the pair uniquely staying behind another day (and half an episode) in case Victoria changes her mind. The last episode is very different in feel to anything we’ve had before: there’s a celebration halfway through then ten minutes of Jamie’s anguish at having to leave Victoria behind and trying to change her mind. Those scenes are very real, this team are so close and we feel as if we know them well even though they’ve only been together a year. The final episode, in all the foam, was partly improvised and sounds like they’re all having great fun, with a sort of ‘last day of term’ feel to it that you only get with people who know each other inside out. That last shot of Jamie staring at Victoria forlornly as she becomes smaller and smaller on the Tardis scanner is really emotional, even for people like me who saw Victoria as a bit of a drip even before she became involved in seaweed, whether in the novel, telesnaps, animation or just your imagination.
That’s one of the real highpoints of ‘Fury’ but there are others, most of them also coming at the end of episodes in the cliffhangers. Victoria getting the worst of it when seaweed even manages to penetrate the room that should be keeping her safe; The sight of a possessed Maggie Harris quietly walking into the sea to that radiophonic soundtrack is chilling (pity poor June Murphy though: the shot was so far out at sea she couldn’t hear the director yell cut and kept going, until a production assistant ran in to get her!); the double act of brainwashed technicians Quill and Oak who kill through their, erm, deadly seaweed breath; the Doctor and Jamie plucking up the courage to walk into the seaweed’s nerve-centre even when they know it’s grown to become an all-powerful being. There are lots of great little moments in ‘Fury From The Deep’ that lodge themselves long in the memory, particularly the very beginning the very middle and the very end and it’s impressively creepy considering the main baddy can’t talk and its basically yet another 1960s Who story about alien possession. It’s the bits in between the set pieces and the episode finales that sag. Victor Pemberton was a newcomer to TV at the time and he will become quite brilliant at it (his episodes for the superlative ‘Timeslip’ in particular come close to rivalling Dr Who in a couple of years). He already knew Dr Who well after appearing in it himself in the all-round similar ‘base under siege’ story ‘The Moonbase’ (he’s the Frenchman Jules Faure, complete with cravat), the first actor to have ever written for the show afterwards (a surprisingly large handful of other actor-writers follow: Glyn Jones who wrote ‘The Space Museum’ and appeared in ‘The Space Museum’, Derrick Sherwin who did pretty much every role going in Who across the 1960s, plus in the modern day Mark Gatiss and Toby Whithouse who both appear in ‘Twice Upon A Time’ among other stories in Moffat’s cheeky re-creation of the ‘battles’ that went on in the writer’s room on Who). As a writer Pemberton’s best at short sharp memorable images rather than feature length stories with intricate plots (which might be why his other big contribution to the Dr Who universe is the similarly fishy ‘The Pescatons’, released as the only standalone spin-off record of Dr Who’s original run). A word too about the invention of the sonic screwdriver which, apart from a gap between 1982-1989 and the 12th Dr messing around with sonic sunglasses, is still with the Doctor now. It’s a very clever idea, both for this story as a whole (where the baddy is defeated by sound) and for the series in general, a very ordinary object like a humble screwdriver given a ginormous extraordinary scifi facelift. Though Pemberton’s description amounts to simply ‘the Doctor’s kind of screwdriver’ rather than anything specific it’s a clever idea, perfectly in keeping with the ethos of the series. At times it will become an irritating get-out-of-jail-free card that ends plots without any real forethought but here it’s a really clever gadget and fully in keeping with the Dr Who tradition of making the ordinary extraordinary. It was supposed to be the Doctor’s pen-torch again, as often used by the 1st Doctor (most visibly in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ as an example of how the fast return switch spring got stuck), but Troughton kept dropping the prop in the cold Kent sea foam so the toggle from Victoria’s lifejacket was substituted instead, later being perfected bit by bit across stories to the version we have now.
There are lots of reasons to love this story then. Alas, taken as a whole, ‘Fury’ isn’t one of the better Who stories and another of the period six parters that really needed to be four or less. There’s simply not enough plot to go on for that long and there are long sections in between the major moments where either nothing is happening or the plot runs round in circles – not uncommon with 1960s Dr Who its true but a bigger problem here than most because there just isn’t any other sub-plot to hold your interest: there’s the clash over the base and the seaweed itself and nothing more. It’s not even the age old conundrum of getting captured and escaping again that’s the problem either but endless scenes of arguing over and over and over. To be honest if I was sentient seaweed taking over the Earth I’d have given it up as a bad job and dived into the sea a long time ago rather than take on a race that talks as much as the humans do. Considering its ‘classic’ status there are very quotable lines from this story beloved of fandom: there aren’t any on the Internet Movie Database for episodes 1-3 for instance, which is pretty much unique for any period of Who. You have to say, too, that the plot is a weird one when you think about it: why would drilling into ancient sea gas cause seaweed to become aggressive? What is it about gas that turns the character of seaweed so (and how can it even have character to turn, given that we’re talking about seaweed here). Is this gas from ancient times buried beneath the sea by our ancestors to keep us safe? An alien influence? A genetic anomaly caused by pollution? And how come seaweed, which is sentient to a degree but doesn’t have a brain that works like ours, suddenly becomes empathic, not just with other bits of seaweed but with humans, a species that aren’t usually telepathic at all? We never find out. It feels as if there’s a scene missing here somewhere where the Doctor works out what would normally be the creature’s motives – here the seaweed becomes a killer, just because. The plot turns full ‘Fun House’ by the end, with a mad dash against time in a vehicle (a helicopter not a go-kart but still) and closing games played in foam, the 1960s version of gunge, before Victoria ‘wins’ the prize of a house at the end. Ironically, given the title, by Dr Who standards this story is not that deep – this really is just a straightforward action adventure yarn, without any of the symbolism or metaphors or warnings to society that mark out Dr Who at its best.
It is, after all, a story about seaweed. It’s not the scariest of monsters is it? Even when filled with an alien menace it’s like a tentacle without the octopus. It’s hardly on a par with the Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Yeti and Patrick Troughton’s evil twin, the other aliens in season five. That’s not what the author thought though: when he agreed with Peter Bryant that maybe it would be better not to simply repeat the mud idea Victor came up with seaweed because he had a phobia of his own about it. He considered it slimy, hated the feel of it with all the bumps and even found the weird twisting shape of it strange. To his eyes it looked like an alien that had didn’t belong on earth and a lot of Victoria’s comments about it giving her the creeps came from the heart. Pemberton’s certainly not the first or last Dr Who writer to put their biggest phobias into their story. The problem with doing that, though, is that no two people have the same phobia. It’s much easier to be scared of an alien with a scary face pointing a gun at people you care about than it is to understand why someone else is scared of a natural object that never caused anyone any harm. Personally I rather like seaweed: it’s not trying to impress you with bright colours, it’s not performing acrobatics underwater, it’s not gathered together in the corner of a zoo and secretly plotting the downfall of humanity, the way you can almost believe some species of animal do, it just sits there doing its own thing. I’m happy to be scared by almost anything in Dr Who but there’s never any reason to be scared here: the worst thing it does all story is give people bad breath and take them for a holiday underwater. That’s an alien trying to be nice in my book. Even the killer foam it causes looks more like someone’s used too much washing up liquid in the sink than anything really scary. The actors sell being scared well and the dialogue has just enough of a fear factor on audio to make you wonder, but in reality? It’s just seaweed. The Doctor might call it a ‘battle of the giants’ for no apparent reason when there’s a cliffhanger coming up, but really by his standards seaweed with ideas above its station is small fry. It’s hard to make a plot out of seaweed and that’s all the plot there is, without the usual allegories or metaphors for something bigger and scarier that can’t be talked about directly, like the cold war, racism, prejudice, gender issues, civil rights or generational wars.
Well, maybe. By and large the Troughton era doesn’t become a multi-generational conversation the way I feel the Hartnell era does: there’s no discussion of world wars or parents being scared of their children more than they are of the monsters. However, ‘Fury From The Deep’ might be the exception. The story would have been written across 1967 when the big news in Britain is the explosion amongst the young of mind-altering psychedelic drugs and the BBC closing down all the pirate radio stations that had sprung up off the coast. The seaweed itself is unusual in Who in that it isn’t ‘evil’ in and of itself, it just becomes that way because of the relentless drilling (as with Gatwick airport I have to say I’m amazed that Euro Sea Gas Power Plant, the company who owned the oil rig and used it to power Southern England and Wales, agreed to the filming because they really don’t come out of the story at all well. Indeed the ninety seconds or so that were cut by the Australian censors survive purely because the gas and Fuel Corporation owned by the Australian government were I the process of converting people’s homes and they were worried viewers might be too scared to let their engineers inside. Which makes sense if you’e seen the scenes of Oak and Quill). It’s basically turned scary by artificial chemicals: very much a parent’s view of LSD. Equally the oil rig looks for all the world like one of those pirate radio stations, brainwashing people and controlling anyone in the nearby radius, a literal alien entity living off the coast. There was a school of thought that rock music was corrupting the young in much the same way and breaking up their happy homes with the lure of a different world parents didn’t understand. The Red Sands Fort had indeed been a pirate station before becoming an oil rig (three times: Radio Invicta in 1964, KING from 1964-65 and Radio 390 from 1965-67), forgotten knowledge now but a lot of viewers would have remembered back in 1968. If that seems an unlikely thing to be writing about, from the vantage point of 2023, when radio is seen as a cosy part of the establishment that plays all the songs with the biggest hit rates on streaming services anyway, that wasn’t how thing were seen in 1968. Music was the medium of the 1960s and back when pocket money only stretched to a long-playing record every birthday and Christmas radio was how many of the people listened to it. The idea that there could be pirate stations that weren’t governed by law, filled with disc jockeys who were so maniacally happy they had to have surely been on something, teaching the youth of the day what to think away from the mainstream made them a really serious threat in the eyes of most of the mums and dads of the day. Music was a secret language, full of slang parents didn’t understand.
It’s a small jump from there to a being that infects people from an off-shore building where the rules of land don’t apply. The government were worried enough to put in a law that forbade the pirate DJs, who mostly became consumed by the BBC and turned ‘professional’, with the creations of radio one and two in late 1967. On the surface everything seemed the same, but it wasn’t: the DJs knew to keep their mouths shut over certain matters and more than a few records were banned by the BBC, often for the oddest things (the most famous one is The Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’ which was banned for the ‘hole in Blackburn Lancashire’ being the ‘holes’ of a drug needle in the arm, which isn’t what that song is about at all, but someone heard the song was about drugs and tried to find a meaning in it somewhere. Similarly ‘I Am The Walrus’, which really is a diatribe against the confines of the petty establishment and the evils of capitalism, was banned for the innocuous word ‘knickers’). It was big news: big enough that The Who made their next album ‘The Who Sell Out’ a thankyou to the pirate radio stations at just the time Pemberton would have been writing this script (maybe the hit single ‘I Can Seaweed For Miles’ gave him ideas. No? Please yourself…) Radio was the big talking point of the day and everyone took a side. However Pemberton isn’t so much of a square as this plot maybe makes him sound: the seaweed is defeated by sound, Victoria’s screams amplified by the Doctor scaring the seaweed and making it retreat, as if hinting that the 1960s music and ‘Beatlemania’ type screaming brings people back to their senses after being brainwashed, rather than being the cause of it (though technically it is, depending which guidebook you read, assistant floor manager Margot Hayhoe (so beloved by the production team she gets a whole van named after her in ‘The Ambassadors Of Death’) or Anneke Wills as Polly imitating the God Amdo and screaming at being turned into a fish person in ‘The Underwater Menace’. It could have been worse: the first draft featured Jamie playing the bagpipes. Something which actually suggests Pemberton was a fuddy duddy after all, as if traditional music could wipe out all that awful psychedelic nonsense. Though for the life of me I don’t know why they didn’t just have the Doctor play his recorder. Which seems such an obvious plot point to make). If nothing else solving the day not with a weapon but with a scream is a nicely different way of going about things in a story that’s otherwise business as usual. Oil too is a particularly olde worlde resource, even in the 1960s, when the world was increasingly turning to nuclear power (with new reserves discovered around this time, albeit on the North Coast not Kent), so could it be that Pemberton is actually on the side of the kids about the dangers of taking the planet’s resources, ahead of his time as an ecological writer afraid for his children and grandchildren’s future on a dying planet? (And why not: you can be both).
What’s interesting is that this element of sound isn’t there in the original. By which I don’t mean the first draft of this script for once (which is closer to the finished product that pretty much any Who story not written close to the deadline) but the original version of Victor’s idea first broadcast on radio as ‘The Slide’ in 1966. That story too was inspired by Victor’s fears of just what a scary place the natural world can be and how little it cares about humans. It’s really very similar, just with earthquakes and mud slides where the seaweed is in Who (with both threats being mute they’re pretty much interchangeable actually, except that one story is on land and another at sea). Victor pitched it to Who first, back in 1965 (when it was a 1st Dr, Ian, Barbara and Vicki story) but story editor David Whittaker rejected it for being both too simple and too expensive. The radio version reveals why: not a lot happens in between the earthquakes that punctuate most of the cliffhangers and there is even less interest to keep listening given that there isn’t even the Doctor or regulars to follow. However the scientific advisor role is very Doctory, recalling his role in UNIT and, weirdly enough, that part is played by Roger Delgado five years before he played The Master. In that story the mud is defeated not with sound but with light and there’s not an oil-rig in sight. The producer of that story was Peter Bryant, who loved the story and remembered it when he moved over to TV and Dr Who, asking Victor to submit his script again. Interestingly all the best bits of the Who version are pretty much all visual; it’s the changes that make all the difference (you can hear for yourself on the animated edition which includes ‘The Slide’ audio as a bonus track: yes, against all the odds, it still exists where the Who version doesn’t, even though the BBC radio archives are in an even poorer state than the TV ones). Listening to it I can see why Whittaker didn’t like it. This story is the opposite of his writing style, which is all about tensely plotted stories that pivot around characters and filled with rich dialogues. To him the idea of a lengthy slow story punctuated by action caused by natural disasters would have been an anathema to him. ‘Fury From The Deep’ is exactly the sort of action-adventure yarn he was trying to avoid.
However there are many different ways of making a good Dr Who story and this one is – mostly - a really really good action-adventure yarn. The cliffhangers are really good, the calmness with which the people are possessed makes this story stand out a mile, creepy and eerie (and it’s a neat twist that the sound of screaming signifies things going right for a change, not wrong) and the mere fact that the seaweed is here, in contemporary Britain even in contemporary houses, is good enough to get you through the sleepier moments. What’s more, it’s an even better character piece that an adventure story and this is a rare story that leaves enough space too for the characters in it to ‘feel’ things after the big set pieces are over. By the end of the story we get to the know the Harrises as well as any incidental characters from the 1960s, especially the dilemma Frank feels at being ordered by his bosses to do things he knows are wrong and his panic when his wife is the next victim. Victoria, too, is never better written than in her finale where she goes from being a peril monkey to a living breathing orphan whose been living on adrenalin too long and is desperate to be rooted somewhere. This in turn makes Jamie seem more three-dimensional than usual, as he becomes more and more excited by adventure but sad at how this puts a distance between him and his friend who were once so close, while Patrick Troughton has by now perfected his unique brand of blending cunningness with kindness. ‘Fury’ is another really good story in other words, one that finds new ways to tell old tales and with a highly suitable ending that puts Victoria right at the heart of the action, getting her own back for every monster who tried to eat her by attacking their senses. There’s an even better coda when (spoilers) – some forty years before Steven Moffat starting doing it every week – it turns out that everybody lives and the alien weed was keeping the Humans alive in an underwater base rather than drowning them. Even the seaweed isn’t destroyed, it just goes back to normal and ends up returning to the sea. Given how well you know these characters and relate to what they’ve been through it feels like a genuine relief, rather than a copout the way it is when the later series does it. This story was ahead of its time in other ways too, as by chance the cast were busy rehearsing episode one when fact followed fiction and an oil rig off the coast of Yorkshire leaked, with the only way to clear up the massive oil spill being to burn it, with questions asked in parliament about the safety of gas and drilling. If any Dr Who story is going to make an impression on young minds its one that the adults were just talking about as a feasible menace the month before. For all its faults (and there are many) it’s impossible to dislike this story. It has charm in spades. Its uplifting but with a menace that’s sort of believable, exactly what Dr Who is for. This story might be as close to a template a story as Dr Who ever ever had, but there’s a reason why it took from so many stories and so many stories to come copy from it: ‘Fury’ distils the essence of at least this era of the series all in one go, ordinary people fighting a foe they don’t understand and human resilience coming out on top with the Doctor as an arbitrator.
Still, despite all the love and affection tat fans have for it, I still don’t feel as if I understand why this story is as loved as it is. This is surely half a great story rather than all-time classic, a story that doesn’t have as much going for it as the best ‘base under siege’ stories and one that by 1968 standards was starting to fall into a rut: even set at land rather than sea, with a monster that doesn’t lumber so much as ooze and in a setting in contemporary Britain rather than the near future, even with a helicopter chase and lots of location filming at the seaside, there just isn’t enough to separate this story from the other similar ones around it. It’s an average kind of a story, even if by 1968 standards that means an average that is pretty darn high. I do wish, though, that I could actually see it so I could know for sure, rather than having to second guess based on reading the book, listening to the soundtrack and eyeing the (not always terrible faithful) animation. ‘Fury From The Deep’ was the very last Dr Who story to be junked, as late as 1974, frustratingly close to the home video age when the BBC began to see all those tapes in their vault as an asset that could make them money rather than as a problem taking up space. If only they’d waited just a few more years then ‘Fury’ might well have become one of my real favourites rather than another of those ‘nearly’ stories.
POSITIVES + The sound effects by the Radiophonic Workshop (and especially by Dick Mills) are re-used so often in Who they quickly become a pain on audio but watching the telesnaps alongside them shows you how well they would have worked in tandem with the visuals, all too believably alien and other-worldly. There’s a specific sound to this story like no other, a sort of cross between Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, background radiation and a wonky cement mixer. As much as the whole nation seemed to be hiding behind the sofa at the Quinn and Oak cliffhanger according to folklore, it’s the sound effects that make that scene, enhancing their heavy panting and make you feel as if you’re witnessing a threat so terrible the whole of Earth is doomed. Even if the music seems to think it a suitable time to play the ‘Laurel and Hardy’ cuckoo theme tune. Goodness knows what would have happened in Pemberton’s planned spin-off series starring the two engineers though. As characters they’re only interesting when they’re possessed and one of them doesn’t talk, the Penn and Teller of the Whoniverse. Would they have gone round the world fixing people’s plumbing and keeping them safe from extra terrestrials in the pipes? Actually on second thoughts that sounds quite good (better than ‘Class’ anyway): that’s another spin-off I’m pitching to Russell T Davies…
NEGATIVES - There’s an entire helicopter chase sequence at the end of part five. It should be thrilling, as the Doctor and Jamie chase after a kidnapped Victoria as a demented Robson whisks her away to the seaweed lair– and I reserve the chance to change my mind if the visuals get re-discovered one day – but if it turns out anything like the 1970s helicopter chases then it’s probably not much cop, only in black and white. And this one goes on flipping forever – it seems very out of character that someone with the skills of the Doctor (particularly given the gadget lover he’ll become as the 3rd Doctor) is so bad at flying it that he nearly crashes it several times over. Almost as if the plot needs to fill another ten minutes with some extra peril because its run out of all the ways it can make seaweed scary. If the last episode is ever re-discovered I’m willing to bet I’ll be sick of the sight of foam by the end of that too as what would be a two minute scene in other stories lasts near enough for twenty here.
BEST QUOTE: Van Lutyens: ‘Whatever it is that’s in the pipeline that’s jamming the impeller, that’s taken over the rigs, is a menace and a threat to us all!’
PREQUEL/SEQUEL: ‘The Sea Devil’ is one of the last Dr Who strips to feature in ‘TV Comic’, starring the 4th Doctor (1979). Despite the title it doesn’t feature Malcolm Hulke’s creations but does feature another invasion by sentient seaweed in an adventure that’s remarkably similar to ‘Fury’ (it even takes place on an oil rig!) despite the Doctor never once experiencing any sense of déjà vu. Just to confuse matters more it very much feels like a third Doctor story, featuring Tom Baker’s Doctor driving up and down the British isles in Bessie and clashing with a local authority figure that won’t listen to him. There’s no Brigadier though – just a mad professor who knows the Doctor of old and is working for a petrol manufacturer that’s been under attack since drilling in the sea off Scotland. The seaweed works in exactly the same way as in ‘Fury’, except for the detail that it’s bright pink! The ending is much more violent too, as fits the comic version of Dr Who, with a number of barrels of petrol dropped on its head which are then set alight. Ouch!
Not forgetting ‘Dr Who and The Pescatons’, a 1976 vinyl record by Victor Pemberton in which the 4th Doctor and Sarah Jane outwit a giant alien shark whose made a home in the Thames. At times it feels like a straight repeat of ‘Fury From The Deep. Right down to the seaweed that draws attention to the monster at the start of the story (although this one is ‘metallic’), the plot twist that the monster is affected by sound and the Doctor breaking off to play a woodwind instrument (though here it’s a piccolo). Plotwise this story is all over the shop, with a first person narration that’s as pompous and ripe as Dr who ever came and you have to say this story is a lot closer to the manic energy of the Dr Who comic strips than it is the TV version. Even so, as the only story with the ‘proper’ voices fans could replay as many times as they wanted, the record is a popular one with fans and there are some of us who can narrate the whole thing to you, in order.
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