Wednesday, 18 October 2023

The Sea Devils: Ranking - 36

 

The Sea Devils

(Season 9, Dr 3 with Jo, 26/2/1972-1/4/1972, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Malcolm Hulke, director; Michael E Briant)

Rank: 36

   'I should hate you Doctor, exterminate you Doctor, you got me in between the Sea Devils and the deep blue sea!' 





 


NCIS: Gallifrey, as the 3rd Doctor uses the help of some new friends from the navy, after working with their cousins the armed forces (‘The Invasion’) and the RAF (‘The Mind Of Evil’) in a fun and popular story. You see, there’s a story in most Dr Who eras that sums up everything it can do within one handy bite-sized piece, the moment when each production team of Who is running like a well-oiled machine that knows exactly what they’re doing without any of the things that, to use the underwater metaphor, torpedo the other stories around them and this is the 3rd Dr’s example. When you fish in Dr Who’s great waters you never quite know what you’re going to get and especially in this rollercoaster era – sometimes a tasty treat, sometimes a whale that’s impressive but so colossal you don’t quite know what to do with it (‘The Silurians’ is a bit like that), sometimes an old boot, but in this one you get the catch of the day. The production team have fished these waters, know that there’s a good catch to be had and get it, with every department pretty much nailing what they have to do. Does ‘The Sea Devils’ do any one thing better than any other Dr Who story? No. Is there any great hidden extended metaphor, special insight into human life or particular intelligence going on underneath the surface of the script? Not really. Does it ask the big moral questions of its Silurian predecessor? Not a chance. Is it still one of the greatest Dr Who stories of them all? Most definitely! Just look at some of the things on offer: alien beings rising from their great long slumber. The way the story has been shot using the help of one of the armed forces for extra location realism. The Master teaming up with a lesser foe for added top trump power. Wait, didn’t we have this one already?! Well yes we did – ‘The Sea Devils’ is a recycled story in so many ways, as reclaimed as the string vests the title creatures are wearing (from, so its hinted, all the nets fishermen keep throwing down to the bottom of the sea). However this isn’t just recycling but up-cycling, sticking old bits together to make something that still feels impressively new so well you can’t see the join: it’s a particularly brilliant combination of things no other series could do but which Dr Who can do better than anyone.


Usually when stories try this sort of thing they seem lazy as if they’re falling back on things that have already been done, but there’s a spring in the step of ‘The Sea Devils’ as if everything we’ve had before it is a big ol’ dress rehearsal and this time the production team are going to show off all the things they know work well, with the added frisson of difference that everything is on water not sea. ‘The Sea Devils’ draws from plot elements in favourite stories like ‘The Invasion’ (‘big shooty battles with the army as Cybermen come out of the sewers’ becomes ‘big shooty battles with the navy as Sea Devils come out of the sea’), ‘Terror Of The Autons’ (‘The Master teams up with a mute alien foe’ becomes ‘The Master teams up with an alien foe...wearing a string vest!’) ‘The Mind Of Evil’ (‘The Master in prison with a machine!’) ‘Fury From The Deep’ (‘something alien has been attacking the oil rigs!’) ‘Inferno’ (fracking hell!’) and of course ‘The Silurians’ (‘a monster older than humanity coming back to reclaim their planet). All those earlier adventures were made by a production team who were too new to be fully comfortable in their roles yet or not that sure in the direction they were heading in. What this era of the show has that the people making those earlier stories didn’t is the extra boost of confidence that comes with stability. By the time of ‘The Sea Devils’ everyone’s had a while to get used to doing things (this is the first time in Dr Who history we have the same Doctor, main companion, producer and script editor all there for a second consecutive season) and what’s more they know they’re doing them well: the TV ratings are soaring, Dr Who is the talk of the playgrounds once again and everyone is just having such a ball going in to work every day. That’s the big change between what we’ve had before: the confidence. There’s no doubt any of these pieces will work because they’ve all worked before.The change between season 7 and 9 particularly is striking. Where ‘The Silurians’ was a gritty tense philosophical debate that asks big questions with a lot of talking across seven detailed episodes ‘The Sea Devils’ is a big bright cartoon that breezes through six parts and doesn’t ask anything bigger than ‘how are they going to get out of that cliffhanger then, eh?’ Where ‘The Silurians’ is a debate about what it is to be Human and what we might think if we find out that we are the species that are alien to Earth, ‘The Sea Devils goes ‘ooh look, monsters!’ There’s no great moral issue here, no hidden layer, no extended metaphor for life in Britain in 1972, no sense of ambition beyond making a blooming great set of episodes which makes this the sort of story I normally wouldn’t like. And yet it is a blooming great set of episodes: there are few stories that are as consistently entertaining, inventive and watchable as this one in any era of Dr Who. There are just enough ‘depth charges’ behind the silliness too, as writer Malcolm Hulke once again asks us to think about what we would do if Earth really belonged to someone else and again finds Human beings wanting.


That’s much the same take as ‘The Silurians’ but it feels different this time because, rather than tell it from the point of view of the Humans finding the Silurians strange, much of this story is told through the googly eyes of the Sea Devils themselves, a race who clearly find Humans strange (as well they might). Michael Briant, one of the best ‘classic’ Who directors (that’s his voice in a cameo as the DJ Jo says is her ‘favourite’), picks up on Hulke’s script and makes it like a nature documentary, but one made by the Sea Devils themselves. We have multiple camera angle shots of humans doing the very Dr Who thing of having the ordinary suddenly look extraordinary (close ups of them eating food, with a sort of heat cam that pictures body warmth – something that cold-blooded reptiles would automatically find strange), while we have one of the most bizarre music concrete scores in the history of the show.  Though it’s a familiar tale it feels like one the Sea Devils are telling this time which happens to have been dubbed into an Earth language by mistake. All its missing is Devil Attenborough’s voiceover across the top: ‘Watch how these strange apes react with immediate violence and panic, the way they go into instant survival mode rather than protect each other or see the bigger picture. What a strange species they are, sitting round tables talking when we’re taking back their world. Tune in tomorrow for more of ‘That Was Life On Earth’.  

  
Plus it’s in the sea! That’s the big hook of this story, which allows everyone to get away with stuff they’d already done buit in a completely new way and it’s a surprise actually they hadn’t tried this before (aside from the distinctly fishy Atlantis tale of ‘The Underwater Menace’ and the oil-rig bound ‘Fury From The Deep’): the sea, after all, is where most scifi/fantasy tales of old used to be set, a world full of unknowable depths and scary sea monsters and ‘alien’ (as in ‘foreign’) people from cultures that were totally unlike yours. As times went on and mankind mapped the seas he turned first to the mountains, then to the Poles, then to the stars, but it’s a fact that we still know more about the moon than we do about what lies on the bottom of our deepest oceans and a lot more humans have been in space than have ever been all or even most of the way down our deepest seas. Of course a Dr Who monster is lurking down there, sleeping, waiting to be woken up by our oil rigs – that all makes perfect sense (and explains a good few sea mysteries to boot). Rather than just being a gimmick it all makes sense: just as we have different ‘tribes’ of humans in different parts of the Earth so, in the distant past, the cave-dwelling Silurians had cousins who only lived in the water. It’s a setting that feels natural in the story, with Hulke writing in a prison like Fort Knox where The Master has been imprisoned, miles away from anywhere after he was captured at the end of ‘The Daemons’ and he seems much more of a threat than normal because even out here we aren’t safe from him (the novelisation includes the extra detail that the British government had decided to revive executions just for him but The Doctor had intervened and pleaded for life imprisonment instead, which makes sense. His visit along with Jo is well played, treated not as a chance to gloat the way it so often is when it’s the other way round – see ‘Frontier In Space’ - but like a relative visiting the black sheep of the family, sad that it had to come to something like this). The setting also enabled Barry Letts to enlist the help of the navy, offering them the same deal as their cousins: Dr Who would basically be a glorified recruitment film for them and make them popular in the eyes of a generation of children, in return for some extras, some guns and stock footage, perhaps in response to Prince Charles joining the navy and thus making them as uncool as anything is possible to be with the under-thirties (though as it happens Malcolm Hulke is so anti armed anything they still come across as the bad guys, beaten silly by the invading monsters and blowing them up on the orders of a civil servant because they’re too thick to negotiate peace: contrast this with the army who are actually pretty courageous in ‘The Invasion’ and the RAF who at least have some cool helicopters in ‘The Mind Of Evil’,. As Hulke knows well, if you pick up on the message of war rather than peace from Dr Who and delight in blowing things up rather than finding out how to ask monsters to tea then, despite the backdrop of UNIT, then you’re watching the series wrong). Jon Pertwee is clearly having the time of his life revisiting his youth: he really was in the navy and was assigned to the Bismark, one of the bigger British casualties of WW2, though luckily for us he was on a training exercise the day it was sunk. In the meantime he’d spent so many years in a radio studio pretending to be on a boat in ‘The Navy Lark’ it must have been weird being back on board an actual ship again – and a majority of the Dr Who audience would have got the ‘joke’ about that back then too, not least the fact that one of Pertwee’s ‘funny voices’ was called ‘The Master’ long before Dr Who came along; Writer Malcolm Hulke and producer Barry Letts had also been assigned to the navy during WW2 so I’m surprised Barry didn’t pick this one to direct himself (Patrick Troughton was in the navy too and higher up than any of them, which must have been hilarious for any of the sailors in his charge one who saw him running away from the fish ballet in ‘The Underwater Menace’. Oh and in case you’re wondering Roger Delgado was a major in the army corps, which must have been even more fun for the people under his command watching him outwit UNIT every week).


It’s also the way this story is told that makes it sing. The Master doesn’t just clash with the Doctor in words but has a swordfight with him – and not the sort of ‘filler’ ones you get in other stories like ‘The Androids Of Tara’ or ‘The King’s Demons’ either but one that heightens the drama between the two and is a nice bit of character (the Doctor defeats The Master without even trying, being impossibly smug as he breaks off for a sandwich halfway through, but The Master wins by playing dirty!) It’s a sign of the breezy confidence that there even is a swordfight: this prison clearly didn’t get the memo about The Master (what jail leaves swords on the walls?!) and it’s the most blatant example of something film studies people call ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ in all of Who (because productions can’t afford mere decoration: if something is seen on the wall in act one it will be used in act two!) Mind you this is a weird kind of prison all round – there are no bars on the windows and most of them are open! The Sea Devils don’t just appear the way The Silurians did, kidnapping humans one by one, but in a mass invasion from the sea (one of those iconic Dr Who images – not least because The Sea Devils seem too ‘big’ to be human; in reality the extras are wearing the Sea Devil heads as ‘hats’ on top of their heads and peering out through a hole  in the neck). There’s the mother of all ‘chase’ sequences across a blooming great minefield, something they couldn’t have done without the navy’s help. There’s the weirdest assortment of vehicles in the show’s history (hovercraft, motorboats, speedboats submarine, diving bell and a helicopter that seems to have had a paintjob mid-air as it switches between red and blue). Dr Who gets to play with the biggest guns (including one they weren’t technically allowed to sue as it was new, but so accurate Edwin Richfield’s portrayal of Captain Hart that the sailors automatically agreed to anything, so he asked to use it and the director cheekily smuggled a camera in). The location filming makes god use of ‘No Man’s Land Fort’ off the coast of the Isle of Wight considering it was a last minute substitution (Hulke’s script was set on an oil rig, but none agreed to the BBC filming there). It was built in 1860 to annoy the French but never actually saw battle for real – the public nicknamed it and another two forts across the English channel as ‘Palmerston’s Folly’. The fort went up for auction in 1988 and was surely the most expensive bit of Dr Who memorabilia ever; it was sold to a property developer so you can live in an actual Who location at least (if you have the money!) The Isle of Wight is a whole new untapped location, exotic (ish) without having to travel overseas and apt for two reasons: it’s the source of the largest quantity of dinosaur fossils found on British soil (maybe the Sea Devils had a dino pet too?!) and the next obvious place the Nazis would have invaded after the Channel Islands so for a particular generation seeing an invading army up the coast was something they’d long feared anyway. You only need to compare this story to the ’other’ underwater Who story, ‘The Underwater Menace’ – this story’s daft antithesis in every way – to see what difference it makes filming outside as compared to inside a big fish tank in a TV studio. The outside of The Master’s prison, meanwhile, is ‘Norris Castle’ in Cowes, also on The Isle Of Wight and it’s another great location, impenetrable and imposing, though it never was a prison and only ever a house (Queen Victoria lived here when she was a child. Which, given that Jenna ‘Clara’ Coleman played her in the most recent and best adaptation of her life in a childhood scene set there which is very like Clara as a Dalek, makes a lot of sense).


And then there’s the extras. Boy are there extras! This is a story that feels as if the whole world is involved, not just the few people in front of the cameras. While ‘The Invasion’ made good use of the army and ‘The Mind Of Evil’ had one great battle sequence as a day-out for the airforce, ‘The Sea Devils’ makes full use of the navy their goodwill and their weapons, personnel and locations. Hulke even names his characters after real navy vessels as a sort of thankyou (HMS Hart, HMS Blyth and HMS Walker were all in service in 1972). It’s a fond farewell to HAVOC too, the stunt team who will turn up individually after this but never get a full credit again. As a goodbye ‘present’ Letts gives them far more screentime than normal: that’s Terry Walsh doubling for Pertwee in the sword-fencing scene and getting his first line as a ‘thankyou’ (he’s the tall security guard who tries to stop The Doctor);  that’s Stuart Fell as the dying sea devil who does a backflip after he’s been shot (as a thankyou for his least glamorous job: dressing up in Jo’s clothes for the long shot of her and the Doctor climbing down from the helicopter ladder). There’s even an injoke as Trenchard quotes from Shakespeare the line where they got their name: ‘Cry HAVOC! And let slip the dogs of war’. In some Dr Who stories the action scenes and stunts seem gratuitously grafted on, but this is such a natural action story and all the action sequences are so different to each other that it adds to the writing rather than distracts from it. You feel the tension in this story and the sheer size of the extras (real sailors fleshed out with the odd stuntman) make the scope seem bigger.


And yet this is more than just a recruitment video: Malcolm Hulke is too good a writer to just make this a tale of derring do between goodies and baddies; lurking, submerged, across this story is the issue of trust and manipulation. The Master’s been stewing inside an impregnable prison on an island between England and France even he can’t escape from outright. The 3rd Dr, who knows what it’s like being trapped in one place when you used to be able to travel freely across all time and space, is sorry for him and pays a visit along with Jo. To all intents and purposes The Master has acclimatised to his new life better than the Doctor ever has: he’s always been good at fitting in wherever he goes where the Doctor can’t help but stand out and Roger Delgado is superb as an apparently gentler, cuddlier Master whose enjoying passing the time of day, joking about putting on weight and passing the time watching The Clangers on TV (the episode ‘The Rock Collectors’; his joke – and yes it is a joke – to his thick prison boss Trenchard that ‘they seem to be some strange alien life form’ is delightful: so few baddies in anything ever get the chance to be funny and laugh at themselves; and yes I do think the Drashigs from ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ were based on the soup dragon turned evil). Of course it’s all a ruse but, just for a moment, you think it might actually be true. The ruse is that while the Dr is off seeing to another case on behalf of UNIT about sightings of a monster on an oil rig, The Master’s heard about it too and is putting together a machine to control The Sea Devils. A race that have to make their own choice about whether to trust him – a choice that turns out to be wrong. Only The Master has bitten off more than he can chew (again) and The Doctor has to trust in his help to stop them. The Doctor also gains the trust of The Sea Devils that he can broker a peace, something rudely broken by the Humans (again). ‘The Silurians’ was all about trust too, but somehow having The Master in there, apparently a changed man, makes the idea of trust extra complicated: though The Sea Devils do all the skilling it’s mostly on The Master’s say so. He’s the real villain of the piece, yet he’s so good with his words and so charming people listen to him in a way they never quite do for the more outspoken Doctor, despite his track record for doing good. It’s a real web, maybe even a netting, of lies and misunderstandings this story that makes it more than just your regular Dr Who punch-up. I love Hulke’s scripts not just for their morality and messages but because you see people change across the course of them. The Doctor learns not to be so trusting even when he wants to think The Master has changed his ways. The Master learns that even he can’t control The Sea Devils. Humanity learns that maybe blowing up an intelligent race at the end of ‘The Silurians’ maybe isn’t the best solutions to their problems. Jo learns to think for herself without the Dr always there, in a story that gives her more to do than usual (she knocks out three guards and manages to unpick handcuffs. Go Jo!) And The Sea Devils? They learn to ignore the Doctor (who keeps banging on about mankind’s good bits) and The Master (who keeps exploiting the bad) and are really just a force of nature, of inevitable change, who are woken up by mankind’s greed and reliance on oil and are only stopped through co-operation and, well, trust (with even The Master helping to clear up his own mess for once).


It’s not just the script or direction either: ‘The Sea Devils’ is one of a handful of classic Dr Who stories where every single part up and down the cast is perfectly played. Jon Pertwee is really comfortable with his Doctor by now and is having great fun name-dropping in between bristling at authority figures (he’s a good bristler is Pertwee) and moments of action (weirdly his biggest ‘accident’ on camera in Who comes when he hurls himself at the barbed wire, forgetting his sonic screwdriver was in his pocket and badly bruising his ribs. Lots of bigger accidents off-screen and in other series though!) Katy Manning has worked out how to play Jo by now: she’s loyal and sweet but not just simpering, as ready to rescue the Doctor as he is her and they make for a delightful double act. She was having a great old time too in between the sea-sickness, once accidentally pressing a wrong button in the ‘hovercraft’ scene and causing a dozen sailors to fall on top of her in one of Dr Who’s most famous outtake moments (sadly not kept!) Roger Delgado is, as always, masterful, so charming even the audience half-believes he might actually had a change of heart despite all past experience and, like the Doctor totally at home anywhere – albeit through manipulation. All this despite being badly seasick for much of the location filming and a phobia of water (or at least that’s how Pertwee remembered it, calling him ‘the bravest coward I ever knew’ for his scenes of drowning in this story; his widow Kismet says actually he was on strict instructions that he couldn’t get his costume wet as there wasn’t a spare; either way his move from motoring along in charge to being out of his depth is note-perfect). You learn a lot about the Doctor-Master relationship which is at its gentlest here, The Doctor admitting as much about their background as he ever has (‘we were almost friends – you could say we were at school together’). In the supporting cast Clive Morton’s brainwashed prison warden Trenchard is one of the best mindless bureaucrats the 3rd Dr ever had to challenge and Richfield’s Captain Hart a more than decent naval substitute for the Brigadier (though no one can measure up to Nicholas Courtney, who gets a well deserved holiday). Martin Boddey is one of the all time great Dr Who civil servants too: barbaric dressed up in flowery language and a suit and tie. Truly, though, all the parts are played perfectly right down to the characters who only have one or two lines – everyone believes in this world and makes the most of it.  


The Sea Devils don’t have the character of their Silurian cousins – we only ever hear one speaking and they’re clearly not as clever or advanced (the next time we see The Sea Devils in ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ they’ll be a mere army led by the Silurians) but they look the part:  recognisably similar yet strikingly different. John Friedlander again provides some excellent masks, while the costumes are excellent, modelled on turtles and mostly a boiler suit sprayed green and covered in latex. They somehow look threatening lumbering around slowly, especially draped in seaweed and dripping in water. Originally they were nude but the script mentioned a ‘ray gun’ (another inventive design, a round disc rather than your normal pistol looking gun which looks like a compact disc though it was probably modelled on a dentist’s circular head torch) and so it was decided to give them a belt. Then having them walking around nude except for a belt looked daft so on the spurt of the moment the string vests were added; the director excitedly raved to Terrance Dicks on location about how fantastic they looked now,  but the script editor saw the rushes and thought they looked ‘bloody stupid’. Somehow, both are true. Even more than the design, though, it’s the theory: scientists reckon that if life does exist on other planets then it’s most likely amphibious, given how crucial water is to life (and how life on our planets started in the sea): as a result The Sea Devils (and the Silurians and indeed Sil later on) are arguably more true to life as any Dr Who monster we have. Unlike The Ogrons, stupid ape-aliens who seem an odd match for one of the smartest people the universe has ever seen, The Sea Devils make sense as part of the plan and give The Master a ‘navy’ of his very own; as Earth natives they know their way round this planet better than he does and can do all the underwater things he can’t. The only thing missing are UNIT and even they don’t feel like too big a hole given that they’ve been substituted with naval extras who actually look like they know what they’re doing.
The result is a story that might not do anything other stories don’t do but does pretty much all of it better: the plot moves at a rate of knots with some classic cliffhangers, the monsters are memorable, The Master is a real threat rather than a pantomime villain, all the parts are perfectly cast, there are action sequences a-plenty but some intelligence in the script and witty wordplay when the characters do actually speak, in an ‘underwater’ setting that hadn’t been tried before (and hasn’t been matched the few times they’ve tried it since). Basically if you can’t find something to love in this story then this series probably isn’t for you.

 Considering that this story only existed so that Hulke could ‘correct’ a mistake he’d made with the dating for ‘The Silurians’ ,which was pointed out in a letter to ‘Junior Points Of View’ (despite the name both the Silurians and Sea Devils fit best coming from the late Jurassic period – Hulke picked ‘Silurian’s because he liked the name but the Earth was incapable of sustaining any life at that point, even reptilian life. And no, the Doctor’s correction to ‘Eocenes’ in this story is just as wrong, as well as making them sound like a laundry detergent rather than a Dr Who monster) it’s remarkable just how much this story gets right, trading the depth of the deep-sea dive of ‘The Silurians’ for a boating trip that’s far more fun and visual. Not many Dr Who stories work all the way through without too much going wrong somewhere but this one manages to be pretty darn spiffing all round with a clever script, great acting, strong visuals, just enough change for variety but also stability so everyone knows what they’re doing. Nautical ‘The Sea Devils’ may be – but it’s nice.


POSITIVES + There’s a lot of model work in this story and a great number of oil rigs and submarines that look as impressive as any model shots in the series even now. A bit too impressive in one case: long-standing Dr Who model maker and sub creator Mat Irvine was interviewed by Naval Intelligence over how he managed to build a prop that happened to be identical to a secret sub they had been working on for years. The Navy were spooked by the coincidence and thought it had to be the result of a leak (never a good thing to have around a submarine) and thought that obviously he had to have seen some top secret plans and he’d given away secret intelligence to the Russians (who all watch Dr Who on the BBC, obviously). It was actually from a model kit picked up at Woolworths, but touched up with a number of other features from other sources (including a bulk load of bits and pieces bought from Gerry Anderson now that he’d stopped working with models and started working with real people), including an extra propeller that happened to be in the exact place it was on the real submarine. Really it just goes to show the extra thought and attention to detail that went into all the model shots in Dr Who, as Irvine properly sat down to work out where the propeller would go if he was designing a real submarine. Certainly if I was designing a vehicle from scratch Mat is exactly the sort of person I’d be hiring, making miracles out of next to nothing.


NEGATIVES - You’re director Michael E Briant (on his second Dr Who story but already seen as a ‘safe pair of hands’). You’ve been handed one of the better Dr Who scripts to film. You’ve got the perfect actors lined up to say the words. The navy are bending backwards to be helpful. This looks as if its going to be one of the best Dr Who stories ever, if only because everyone involved knows what they’re doing. And then composer Malcolm Clarke chooses this story to deliver a curve-ball with one of Dr Who’s most experimental scores ever (music being the thing that tends to arrive at the last minute and which the director has least control over; no matter how many production meetings you try to have making sure everyone’s on the same page its impossible to direct a composer the same way you can an actor, cameraman or prop builder). It’s terribly distracting, often at all the worst moments and sounds like a cement mixer being played underwater by an orchestra at war with a jazz band while both are being bludgeoned to death with a synthesiser. It was made with an early synth, a VCS3 to be exact, which had to be programmed a note at a time rather than ‘played’ the way later ones were. I’ve long had this theory that Clarke kept being called out of his office every three notes and kept forgetting where he was but didn’t want to start again as there are no links between any of these notes that I can see, he might as well have got a cat to paw at it at random (and maybe he did?) While some Dr Who monsters deserve a gonzo ‘theme tune’ of their own (‘The Krotons’ or ‘The Quarks’ come to mind) ‘The Sea Devils’ are the ‘wrong’ sort of monster for this, they’re too...Earthy somehow. Even if they live under the sea. Some fans admittedly think this is one of the best musical scores of all if only for being so alien. While I’ll stand up for any fan’s rights to have any opinion they choose, let’s face it some fans are just plain weird: this score is the biggest atonal mess and my least favourite in the classic series (and the worst overall following the space opera of ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’).


BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘Why begin a long and bloody war where thousands will be killed on both sides?’ Sea Devil: ‘We shall destroy man and reclaim the planet’. Dr: ‘Is there nothing I can say to make you reconsider?’ Sea Devil: Nothing Dr: ‘Then I’m sorry’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The season 9 blu-ray release (2023) was accompanied by the usual exclusive trailer/sequel, which this year saw Katy Manning donning her wellies as Jo Grant again for ‘Defenders Of The Earth’, as the official title calls it. We follow two kids as they explore Redcliffe Caves where they accidentally wake up a Sea Devil that, startled, shoots at them (well he has just woken up after a very long nap and clearly needs his beauty sleep, I’d be doing the same). Thankfully the kids are saved by Jo Grant who’s borrowed Sarah Jane’s sonic lipstick (‘just my colour!’) ‘What the hell was that?’ asks one of the children, understandably given the circumstances, at which Jo talks at lengths about her memories of The Sea Devils and works out that there must be some of their eggs nearby (she also blames climate change for changing The Sea Devils’ hatching cycle and says more and more are being discovered all over the world. You know, I thought Keir Starmer looked familiar). Suddenly one of the rather polystyrene-looking eggs hatches and its soooo cute!!! Please make some toy baby sea devils somebody, I so want them (good job Vicki isn’t there – she’d have adopted them all and named them before taking them with her and accidentally endangering us all). Next question ‘How do you know all this stuff?’ ‘Oh my darlings’ says Jo wistfully ‘Oh the stories I could tell…’ – many of which are in the set! An unusual trailer this one, less silly than most with a really sombre feeling fully in keeping with most of the year’s deeper and more thoughtful stories (OK maybe not ‘The Time Monster’…)


The first ever Paul McGann book ‘The Eight Doctors’ (1996), written by Terrance Dicks before anyone had seen the 8th Doctor on screen yet, features an amnesiac timelord trying to regain his memories by revisiting his old selves at key moments in their timelines. The chapter with the 3rd Doctor follows on directly after the end of the last episode of ‘The Sea Devils’, with the timelord horrified that The Master has escaped his grasp yet again. Dr 8 first bumps into The Brigadier, who knows all about regeneration but is doubtful about the story: after all if this is a future Dr how come he doesn’t remember Jo? To save time Dr 8 changes his story and says he’s a ‘colleague’ of the Doctor’s and the Brig says that as he doesn’t get many visitors Dr 3 will be pleased to see him. Dr 8 replies that on the contrary ‘last time we met he was exceedingly hostile’ to which The Brig adds knowingly ‘He can be a bit tetchy - I’ve had a fair bit of trouble with him myself’. Dr 3 then arrives by helicopter and responds ‘Oh no, not you again!’ Receiving his missing memories Dr 8 comments ‘well your exile certainly hasn’t been dull’ (he clearly hasn’t downloaded ‘Monster Of Peladon’ yet). As for Jo, she finds Dr 8 ‘decidedly dishy’ and ‘feels as if I’ve known him for ages!’    


The Sea Devils also turned up in ‘The Dr Who Yearbook 1992’, the first annual released after the show was taken off the air. The front cover features nine spaces, one for each of the first seven Doctors, plus the title…and a Sea Devil (and no, it’s not Paul McGann!) Their star billing is because they’re the stars of the comic strip ‘Under Pressure’, the closest the 3rd and 4th Doctors came to meeting in the days before ‘Dimensions In Time’ in a story remembered and told in flashback to Ace by the 7th. The 4th Doctor, travelling alone (so immediately post ‘Deadly Assassin?) works out that he’s on board a submarine, The Jutland, and is met by armed guards, greeting them with a Tom Bakery cry of ‘ahoy there matey!’ The navy mentions a classified incident that The Doctor remembers was the events of ‘The Sea Devils’ before their captain is knocked down by…something! Then there’s a call from another submarine, The Tempest who have a familiar looking scientific advisor on board. The 4th Doctor keeps quiet who he is and for once in a multi-Dr story Dr 3 is quite impressed at the knowledge of this newcomer; Dr 4 meanwhile is overjoyed to talk to Jo again. The Sea Devils then try and take over the engine room but the Doctors stop them with ‘the variable phonetics system…run through a four drift syntactic substitution’, which is basically morse code, relaying the message that all is well and they should go back to sleep. This comic strip was a real joy back in the wilderness years when we didn’t think we’d ever have a multi Doctor story again and the likenesses by Vincent Danks are fabulous throughout – particularly Tom Baker, who never looked so good on paper as this.   


Look out too for the much loved ‘The Making Of Dr Who’ (1972), a one-off collaboration between this story’s chief writers Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks and the first ever ‘factual’ Who book published right in the middle of this story’s transmission. It came about when publishers Piccalo scored an unexpected best-seller with a ‘Making Of Star Trek’ book and though the Who one didn’t do as well a lot of Dr Who mad youngsters became involved in television precisely because of it (one of them, a nine-year-old named Russell T Davies, said it made him realise that making television could be a legitimate career and had this in mind when he created ‘Dr Who: Confidential’ for the 2006 series). Though the book touches on all sorts of things the bulk of it follows ‘The Sea Devils’ from script to screen. There aren’t any revealing stories you couldn’t already have guessed for yourself but it is fascinating seeing Hulke’s writing processes and the suggestions and changes first Dicks and then director Michael Briant makes along the way. Why this story? Legend has it that they approached Dicks who, wanting to be a proper ‘author’ (see the quadzillion Target novelisations he’ll go on to write) eagerly said yes, then realised how much work he had on, at which point he handed it over to his good friend and said ‘here you are Mac, you only have one story this year and you can do this instead of putting your feet up’. If nothing else the book proves that fans of his scripts knew all along: that Hulke was one of the deep-thinkers of Dr Who that really thought and scared about his scripts (or, if not, he was really good at pretending he did for books like this one).  

 

 


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