Doctor Who: Fury From the Deep [1968]

Another victim of the BBC's policy of junking important television while hanging on to every football match ever filmed, I remember this as one of the scariest '60s Who serials. It owes much to Nigel Kneale and John Wyndham, among the series' most frequent sources, and is another instance of a Patrick Troughton story that might have done for Jon Pertwee's earthbound, near-future England tenure.

The TARDIS splashes down like a '60s space capsule off the coast and the travellers wander into a huge installation which supplies all the natural gas for Southern England. The menace is a creeping seaweed and its attendant foam, which seems to have picked up malign intelligence by absorbing human minds and plans to take over the planet - the base is infiltrated by the weed, with various characters taken over, and the Doctor mobilises experts and whoever else is at hand to fight back. It has creepy business with two sinister weed zombies who make mild-mannered house calls and exhale deadly gas through gaping mouths [almost a Body Snatchers effect] and a woman with seaweed wrapped around her body who walks calmly into the sea at the end of one episode. There's high adventure with Troughton piloting a helicopter ['I've got it up'] back from a taken-over rig, and a witty riposte to the complaint that all the show's heroines ever do is scream in that Victoria's taped and focused shriek is used as a weapon to destroy the menace.

This is the serial in which Victoria [Deborah Watling] was written out - she has some lines about how scared she always is ['every time we go somewhere something awful always happens'] and is shifted onto another set of adoptive parents at the end. Interestingly, this means the show can deal with a slight taboo, the possibility of a romantic relationship between sidekicks, as we see that Jamie [Frazer Hines] likes the girl more than he has admitted [she has the conventional joke line 'I didn't know you cared', but perhaps she's being more accurate than she thinks] and is depressed when she leaves. The guest cast are mostly gruff gas-rig types, with Victor Maddern as the martinet who gets taken over and Margaret John as an unusual boss; though most memorable are John Gill and Bill Burridge as Oak and Quill and June Murphy as the posh wife who becomes a weed zombie.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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