Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace
It would be slightly churlish not to mark such a great anniversary with a blog post when the rest of the cult TV blogosphere is, so this is my blog post to mark the 800th anniversary of Doctor Who! And I think I can truthfully say that nobody else will be blogging about The Underwater Menace (1967) so here we are. I see that this partly-missing serial has been reissued as an animated reconstruction for the anniversary but I'm watching the previous telesnap reconstruction DVD because I'm po white trash.
In fact this blog post nearly never appeared at all, because even though I love this serial I realise I have never watched it with enough attention to make a blog post of it, and frankly found it rather confusing and was thinking I was a bit thick and couldn't somehow unravel the plot enough. Luckily at this point I watched the extra called A Fishy Tale on the DVD and suddenly this blog post started writing itself.
Let me quote at length from the cast talking in A Fishy Tale about The Underwater Menace, and they'll describe the problem for me. 'None of this makes any sense, it is entirely insane.' 'It was completely barmy.' 'You're not turning me into a fish.' 'Hugh David read the script, which was a fatal error...' 'It would be a massive embarassment.' 'Hugh was wise, he didn't want to touch it.' 'There was no way the budget was going to work.' 'Patrick liked the idea because it was going to be about Atlantis.' 'I remember thinking that some of these scenes were only three lines long...how is this ever going to work?' 'This is a bit of a dog.' 'It is pretty awful. The scripts are banal.' 'It ranges from spy thriller...to strange prehistoric stuff with weird religious gods...to strange, actually quite moving tragedy in episode 4.' 'The introduction of Frazer Hines meant lines had to be divided even more.' 'Geoffrey Orme [writer] didn't have my character right.' 'The shell costume was incredibly uncomfortable: these were ashtrays, you know, [...] they'd sewn these ashtrays onto a sort of leotardy thingy. A little bit of action and all the shells fell off.'
So that's got the cast's criticism out of the way...much of it completely fair of course. Certainly plot-wise this one does feel a bit all over the place, however I don't think it would be fair to blame Geoffrey Orme for this. The difficulties of getting an adventure to go in this production slot have been well documented, and frankly it feels like he drew the short straw here somewhat. Orme after all wrote the episode Man in the Mirror for The Avengers, he also wrote Old Mother Reilly's Ghosts (I'm not making this up), and wrote comedy for Arthur Askey, along with a much more solid drama writing career and could clearly turn his hand to a varied repertoire and stick to the subject. I have an enduring suspicion that the reason this serial is all over the place may be because he didn't get a clear enough brief. Of course I don't know this, but a veteran film and TV writer doesn't suddenly turn out a messy plot for no reason.
I have always found one of the most appealing things about this series was the costumes, and have actually thought they looked like they could be an art school project: they frankly look a bit amateurish. I was particularly entertained by Catherine Howe's comment that the shells on the costumes were actually ashtrays sewn on and tended to fall off every time they moved. Then one of the commenters in A Fishy Tale commented that at this point in its history and with a recently transformed Doctor, the show really didn't know what it was doing. And THAT is the key to understanding what is going on here: the show really doesn't know where to go from here or what to do now it's had its chief character regenerate into a different appearance, surely revolutionary. What do you do to top that? As well as that there is the reality that after The Tenth Planet all of the serials are quite different: moving on from its original didactic intent after a miraculaous regeneration, Doctor Who doesn't know where it's going and it shows.
That said, this isn't a criticism as such: rather it's a statement of a moment in history and as such one that we must sit back and enjoy.
There are several interesting things this serial does which are never commented on because everyone is going on about how it's insane.
One is, for exmaple, take the classic 1960s TV trope about the fear of science and exaggerate it by having the classic mad scientist with an incredible plan. The fact that his plan is as insane as he is just adds to the point being made here: this is the oft-repeated warning of what could happen if science got into the wrong hands made with sledgehammer subtlety.
Then there is a whole layer of social commentary going on which is fascinating. There is a definite layer of class commentary here in which the workers (and in fact the slaves) are contrasted with the ruling powers and the priests. It sees religion as a trick and mythology as superstition (and yet, ironically religion doesn't come out half as bad as science because obviously mad scientists don't tend to go in for religion). Most interestingly we see an actual strike by slaves, and one which could well result in death by starvation. We even have an actual coup. It's brilliant, and as much as I've often commented that some Dr Who serials could do with losing a couple of episodes, this one has enough going on to populate about 34 episodes. Again this is not a criticism.
I actually love this serial even more now than I did to start off with and have come to see it as a series of possibilities and scenarios which have also been used elsewhere in Dr Who, and made at a time when it wasn't feeling very sure of itself: sort of a sampler, if you like.
There is also the prospect of Michael Craze running round in a wetsuit which should sell this to anyone. Ahem. Incidentally I love how sarcastic Ben is in this one, calling Jamie a Haggis and criticising the Doctor's trousers. Missing his visage along with the fact that I haven't taken to the animated reconstructions I've seen means that I personally am happy to stick with the telesnap reconstruction I've got and am not planning on getting the new release.
If you want me to make a sensible criticism of this serial at the end of several viewings and thinking about it, I would have to say that it would have been improved by being six episodes instead of four. Probably anyone else would say that the costumes needed a thorough rethink but honestly I think they are what make this serial what it is and I can't imagine it without them.
Very highly recommended.
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