Customer Reviews

Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace (BBC Audio Collection)

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Story #32 marks Patrick Troughton's third story as The Doctor and only episode 3 and some brief clips still exists in the BBC's video vault Doctor Who - Lost in Time Collection of Rare Episodes - The William Hartnell Years and the Patrick Troughton Years. The story revolves around fish people, Atlantis and a mad professor with The Doctor dressing in different disguises to free a companion from being turned into a fish person. This does come across as a parody of a b horror flick and is rather amusing in that aspect.

On January 18th, 1967, the first blockbuster spaghetti western 'A Fistful of Dollars' was finally released in the US. It's hard to credit that this coincided with, of all things, The Underwater Menace. Sergio Leone had succeeded in resurrecting the moribund format of The Western in a harsh modern light but, as if to exemplify the gulf of expectation, the BBC showed that in spite of producing near-miraculous TV in some adversity week after week, they could still come up with baffling flights of fancy that just didn't work.

As an audio experience, TUM starts well, with some sparkling dialogue and the now familiar old chestnut of a new companion doing the "gosh" and "golly" routine. Yet as soon as the need for a plot arises, the script degenerates into ponderous cliché. (Zaroff is of course "the greatest scientific genius since Leonardo". Forgive The Second Doctor's deliberate hyperbole but how many scientific geniuses does that ignore?) The regulars are superb; it's just that everyone else is not. As a one-off entertainment for youngsters, there was surely enough feeling for The Doctor and his chums (whom Ben describes as "our lot") to maintain interest and the single surviving episode is surprisingly watchable but as a whole, it's a duffer. Over the top and corny, though not without a certain retro-charm.

Dr Who's most obvious B-Movie.