You know I could have you torn to bits by my guards, yes?
Yes.
I could feed you to my pet octopus, yes?
Yes.
Well you have sense of humour. I too have sense of humour. I need men like you. You come with me, yes?
I come with you.
You’re not turning me into a fish!
It is 1982 and a very youthful version of me (barely a teenager) is sat in a lecture theatre at a Polytechnic (remember them?) in central London. It is the first time I’ve been in a lecture theatre (very grown up!) and my second ‘Doctor Who’ convention. I’m on an away day down to London from Liverpool Lime Street and I’m a mere slip of a lad. It was a day dedicated to Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor and the guest of honour was Michael Craze. The previous year, we had learned via the DWM Winter Special, of the parlous state of the BBC archives with regard to 60’s (and in some cases 70’s) ‘Doctor Who’. There was barely anything of the Target stories I’d grown up reading for this Doctor – ‘Web of Fear’, ‘The Abominable Snowmen’, ‘The Cybermen’, ‘The Ice Warriors’ and ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’. Today, I was also going to see some fragments of what remained – ‘Underwater Menace 3’, ‘The Moonbase 4’, ‘Web of Fear 1’, ‘Enemy of the World 3’ and ‘The War Games 10’. And some say the Troughton era lacks variety.
At that time, I only knew ‘The Underwater Menace’ from a paragraph in the ‘Making of Doctor Who’ and a few photographs of the Fish People in ‘Doctor Who Monthly’. In the convention booklet episode 3 was temptingly described as ‘one of the poorest episodes still in existence of the Troughton Years’! Praising only Troughton and the scene where Sean persuades the Fish People to strike and lambasting Joseph Furst as the worst thing about the story. The lights went down and we entered a world of high camp, a lot of tat, a good measure of 30’s Saturday Morning serial leftovers and a great deal of laughter. Especially the Fish People ballet and I might be ‘remembering’ this in hindsight – gales of laughter at ‘Nuzzink in the ze werld can stop me now’!
I came away thinking ‘well that was fun, but a bit shit’ – I probably would have used the word hokey, if I’d known it back then. Actually, what I mostly came away thinking was that ‘Web of Fear 1’ was one of the best episodes of ‘Doctor Who’ I’d ever seen and ‘War Games 10’ wasn’t too shabby either. But back to the story in hand, as I sat down in 2014 to watch the DVD including the (relatively speaking) newly returned ‘Underwater Menace 2’ I thought largely the same. As I sit down again to watch this once more for this review, my view hasn’t changed – this is a load of poorly written, badly made tat, almost an explosion in a leftover tat factory, replete with a fair old side of ham, but still somehow enjoyable nonetheless. Like a ‘Doctor Who’ holiday special where everyone has taken leave of their senses and that doesn’t have any budget left – just some drapes and whatever is in the dressing up box. I doubt that I’ll be able to explain why I largely enjoy it despite all of that, but I’ll try anyway.
How we got here
Winding back, this story shouldn’t have been made. If William Emms hadn’t fallen ill while working on ‘The Imps’, it is doubtful this would have been, it was in the process of being quietly shelved. Director Hugh David turned the story down, realising he couldn’t make it look convincing on a BBC budget – he went as far as talking to a friend at Pinewood who had worked on ‘Thunderball’ to get an idea of the costings to do the underwater scenes properly. And then opted to direct ‘The Highlanders’ instead. Gerry Davis wasn’t really that impressed and it required a fair bit of rewriting at short notice from both Orme and Davis himself. The cast largely thought it was rubbish and even more so when they saw the sets and costumes. So it was a pretty unloved thing, which it has to be said doesn’t really come across – it rockets along in a sort shonky, madcap, drunken sort of way, a sort of Pogues 1980’s live performance sort of story.
Geoffrey Orme is an interesting writer, he starts out writing comedy films in the 30’s and 40’s – for he likes of Old Mother Riley, Arthur Askey and Flannagan and Allen. Variety pieces really. Later in the early 60’s, he wrote for some adventure TV series, episodes of ‘Ivanhoe’ and an early episode of ‘The Avengers’. ‘Underwater Menace’ is his last TV work and he would only write one more script for a film after it. He died in 1978. He was one of the oldest ‘Doctor Who’ writers at the time (possibly the oldest?) – he was born in 1904 and was 62 when he wrote the script. With a few exceptions born in the 1910’s – most of the core writers of the show in the 60’s and 70’s were born in the 1920’s and 30’s and later and their key influences were the Second World war and the emerging Cold War. Orme would have instead have grown up during the First World War and was in his late 30’s/early 40’s when he served in the RAF in the Second. For a comparison he was four years older than William Hartnell. His age is of interest only really because it potentially implies a different set of experiences and influences than the other writers working on the show in the 1960’s and might explain why this feels slightly out of kilter with the series as a whole.
The plot, such as it is, is a mix of leftovers from 1930’s early morning Saturday serial ideas – ‘Flash Gordon’, ‘King of the Rocket Men’ – ‘mad scientist destroying the world’ stuff from a base made out of a load of old silver tat. It has a dash of Verne and Rice Burroughs in there. And makes no real sense. Which is fine, if you like that sort of thing. On top of that, there’s an awful lot of running about in the middle of it, mostly in a market square, which if maybe not the size of a postage stamp, wouldn’t amount to many if laid end to end. It is the sort of story that forgetting the plot, which everyone clearly does is actually beneficial.
And we have an awful lot of hammy thesping going on. I’ll come to Joseph Furst in a minute, he’s in his own special category. It is in the pantheon of mostly 60’s Who stories, where middle-aged theatrical actors are forced to wear togas or go bare chested or bare armed, with ludicrous headdresses and makeup and dignity is in short order! There are a couple of performances here that I didn’t realise had been in other Who stories – Noel Johnson, who isn’t great as Thous, was later very decent as Sir Charles Grover in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’. Also Peter Stephens who adds a fair slice of ham to Lolem in this, was also Cyril in ‘The Celestial Toymaker’. It is sad that this is the only Who performance (‘K9 and Company’ aside) for the usually reliable Colin Jeavons – there isn’t much for him and like the others he is lumbered with those rather ludicrous bushy eyebrows.
Julia Smith’s direction isn’t actually bad, there are some interesting shots, but nobody could make this work in any serious sort of way. For example, the Fish People ballet looks like everyone’s been at the dressing up box at an amateur dramatic society panto. There are people flapping about at random on bits of wire. Trying to do half-hearted somersaults wearing wrinkled stockings, with their arses stuck in mid-air! It’s like a cheap (actually cheaper) version of Vortis on ice. I mean it was never going to be good, I don’t know whether to weep with laughter or applaud their sheer ‘couldn’t give a f**k’ attitude about the whole thing. Actually I’ll just do both.
Rigsby meets Stan Laurel
Elsewhere, it is a mixed bag for the regulars. Troughton is a bit all over the place, as he is in these first few stories. He is weird, not necessarily in a good way – there’s something almost slightly disturbing about him, shifty in a ‘Rising Damp’ Rigsby sort of way. He is manic one minute and almost childlike innocence like Stan Laurel the next. At times I think he’s great here, the next I just think he’ll be OK in a couple of stories time. Ben and Jamie do OK, despite pretty much occupying the same space and having to share the lines. Polly fares less well, she has a couple of decent moments – ‘You’re not turning me into a fish!’ – but otherwise it is poor stuff for the character and Anneke who deserves a lot better and did get it in other stories.
And there are just some seriously odd things. The aborted operation on Polly is all a bit disturbing and creepy, in a similar way to the disturbing scenes of life force extraction in ‘The Savages‘. But then played for laughs as the Doctor pulls the plug on the lighting and looks innocently at everyone for all the world like Stan Laurel. And we have the Doctor dressing up in the market square, like a fortune teller wearing sunglasses and playing a tambourine – what? While bare chested kids and people in leotards stand around and are pursued by men in rubber. Then he blows some sort of powder through his recorder at Zaroff. It is all just bizarre. I know it is 1967, but at times it feels like a full blown acid trip.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Going back to the review in my 1982 convention programme, one thing that they definitely got wrong in my opinion, was to heap blame for all of this on the performance of Joseph Furst. I’m pretty clear in my own mind now that this would be utter horseshit without Furst. I mean there is nothing to this, it is thin gruel and his performance at least had me laughing all through episode 3, probably more so than in any other episode of the show. In comparison, with something like ‘Horns of Nimon’ I can imagine a version played straight, with some conviction as there is a strong basis for a story there and some decent ideas. It shouldn’t need the size of Crowden’s performance to elevate it really, that adds a different energy to it. Here I can’t see a way of playing this stuff straight. Without Furst it would be firmly in bottom 5-10 stories territory. You could almost have saved on the electricity bill for this and wired him up to the mains in studio, such is the manic, wired energy of his turn here. It is kind of manic zeal. That gleam in his eye is as scary as it is funny. He reminds me of Gene Wilder in ‘Young Frankenstein’. In fact, now that I think of it there is a hint of Mel Brooks about all of this. Furst isn’t the death knell for this, rather he’s it’s saviour.
DOCTOR: But Professor?
ZAROFF: Yes?
DOCTOR: Even supposing you succeeded, you know what will happen, don’t you?
ZAROFF: You tell me, Doctor.
DOCTOR: Well, the water will be converted into superheated steam, the pressure will grow, and crack the crust of the Earth. Destroy all life, maybe even blow the planet apart.
ZAROFF: Yes. And I shall have redeemed my promise to lift Atlantis from the sea. Lift it to the sky! It will be magnificent.
DOCTOR: Yes.
ZAROFF: Bang! Bang! Bang, bang! That’s all.
DOCTOR: Yes. Just one small question. Why do you want to blow up the world?
ZAROFF: Why? You, a scientist, ask me why? The achievement, my dear Doctor. The destruction of the world. The scientists’ dream of supreme power!
I think Zaroff sees some of his own manic, unhinged energy in the Doctor, such that when it is clear that the Doctor intends to defeat him, he almost sounds affronted?
So you’re just a little man after all, Doctor, like all the rest. You disappoint me.
Before that I could almost picture them as Shockeye and the Doctor going on the town for a slap up meal in Seville! Can you imagine that – a buddy movie featuring early Second Doctor and Zaroff? Where they travel the world doing weird science stuff with their pet Octopus and get to dress up in increasingly odd hats.
You see, I have anticipated every situation. There was always a possibility that someone would try to keep me from my ultimate moment of triumph. Now no one can get through this, and all the controls are on this side. Now all I must do is press the plunger when the needle of that dial is over the thousand mark. Simple, no? I tell you, so that you may share the last, great experiment of Zaroff!
And the ending. Well you haven’t quite anticipated every situation professor, our heroes basically kill Zaroff and in the process a few others – f**k ‘em. Atlantis is a bit drowned, but they are used to that. And they all decide that religion was to blame rather than science – and entirely rational view which I heartily approve of, but one I’d find difficult to defend purely on the basis of this story and Zaroff!
No. No more temples. It was temples and priests and superstition that made us follow Zaroff in the first place. When the water’s found it’s own level, the temple will be buried forever. We shall never return to it. But we will have enough left to build a new Atlantis, without gods and without fish people.
To tie this back to that screening in 1982, the DWAS reviewer concluded ‘forgettable’. My thoughts on that would be that that’s the very last thing it is. Whatever it may be, it certainly isn’t easy to forget. So, ‘Nuzink in ze werld’ could be further from the truth. Anyone who thinks otherwise will be fed to my pet Octopus.
I was still laughing as I screen captured the images for this review. It really is funny as f**k! I want Big Finish to do ‘The Adventures of Young Zaroff‘ now – I’d buy it! My ideal casting would have been Rik Mayall, but he’s sadly gone, who could replace Joseph Furst?
A Journal of Impossible Things 