The Underwater Menace

Let’s get the praiseworthy aspects of the story out of the way. The sets are OK, and some of the guest performances are competent. The regulars are excellent, as usual and, indeed, the scenes which only feature them are very good. And that’s it.

The script by Geoffrey Orme is a mish-mash of sheer story-telling idiocy. Professor Zaroff’s plan is stupid (to drain the oceans into the Earth’s core). Zaroff’s motivation is stupid (he’s mad. Mad, I tell you!) This does not necessarily doom the story to failure. However, the stupidity snowballs: because of the stupidity of the villain’s plan, the supporting characters have to be stupid as well, in order to be taken in by it. The Doctor’s plans to stop Zaroff are foiled by the need to pad out the story (how could anyone fall for that ‘feigning illness’ act in episode 3?) so he has to propose two ridiculous contingency plans- make the Fish People go on strike to starve the Atlanteans and then flood half the country. This is backed by some utterly ludicrous dialogue (‘Help me stand at your side so I may feel ze aura of your goodness!’) making this not so much a script, but a lesson in how not to write one.

As said before, there are competent performances from the guest cast (Colin Jeavons and Noel Johnson) but the majority are anything but. P.G. Stephens and Paul Anil are terrible as Sean and Jacko and there is, of course, Zaroff. Joseph Furst’s performance is terrible, but the blame cannot wholly be apportioned to him. In the script, Zaroff is not so much a character as an anchor point for exclamation marks and it would have taken a director of superlative talent to make Zaroff remotely convincing. Julia Smith, however, has no concept of tone or consistency, which means that a ranting megalomaniac like Zaroff has to share a scene with a pantomime dame like Lolem. Smith is fine when a scene is more visual- the marketplace scene is very well shot. However, she seems to have little aptitude for making performances gel, which is not entirely her fault, considering the script. Dudley Simpson’s score is utterly ridiculous and frequently at odds with what appears on the screen. Then again...

This is, in short, bloody awful. It has some appeal as being ‘so bad, it’s good’, but there really are far better ways of spending your time. There are many laughable Doctor Who stories, but this is one of only a handful that are actually written and produced in a way that is indistinguishable from a spoof of the programme. There is not even a hat for the Doctor to like in it.*

_{*actually, there is, but it's a great way to end a review.}

Next: The Moonbase

The Smugglers

The Doctor, with new companions Ben and Polly become entangled in the affairs of smugglers and pirates, when they land in Cornwall in the 17th century. The treasure of Captain Avery is hidden in the town and the villainous Captain Pike is willing to stop at nothing to get it.

Historicals in Doctor Who can have many purposes. They can show how different historical cultures were, they can show how famous events came to pass, they can comically reinterpret history. However, The Smugglers is a story driven by one concept: pirates are great. This is a story that sets out to do nothing more than tell a good story and it achieves this with gusto. As expected, there is a lot of ‘arrr’-ing, cutlass-play and at least one instance of the mainbrace being spliced. The pirates are a very colourful bunch, wonderfully played. Captain Pike is played with great relish by Michael Godfrey as a grimier version of Captain Hook. He commands his crew with an iron fist (sorry!) but knows that the only way to maintain control is to allow the men’s blood-lust to be sated. He is ably supported by George A. Cooper as the very inappropriately named Cherub. The smugglers are represented by the untrustworthy Jacob Kewper (played by David Kelly) and the Squire, as played by Paul Whitsun-Jones, an actor who portrays corpulent authority figures with immense energy, always looking as if he is about to burst a blood vessel.

It is commonly thought that the reason for Hartnell’s departure was ill health. This is strange as in this, his penultimate story, the Doctor takes a very active role and Hartnell throws himself eagerly into the role, and clearly has a ball doing it. The Doctor tricks his way out every deadly situation he ends up in and is clearly having the time of his life. Ben and Polly, though separated from the Doctor, manage to be resourceful and cunning on their own, and Michael Craze and Anneke Wills’s rapport is wonderful.

Surviving footage indicates that this story had excellent production values and effective location filming, but, even from the soundtrack alone, this is a fun story to listen to for all the reasons listed above, most notably the simplest one: pirates are great.

NEXT: The Tenth Planet