Credit lovers of the world, unite! (Yes, I know... this is all less about Fury from the Deep than it is about Fury from the Geek, but it happens.)
April 12th
Fury from the Deep episode four
R: I had a nightmare about Fury from the Deep last night. It wasn’t foam, or gas pipes, or seaweed, or Victor Maddern getting angry with me. It was Dudley Simpson’s music. Every time I closed my eyes, somewhere in my brain it’d come at me – that clanky-clanky theme he gives Oak and Quill. I got very tired of it, frankly. Say what you like about Arc of Infinity – and there’s much that one can – but Roger Limb’s ooo-eeee-oo music never robbed me of sleep.
This episode has a desperation to it that’s very recognisable and real. It’s not the desperation we’re used to from The Ice Warriors or The Web of Fear – by this stage in those stories, everyone involved had long realised that everything was going to hell in a handbasket. Not here, though; it takes until the end of episode four for there to be an accepted acknowledgement that an invasion has begun. I like that – I like the way that the most chilling scene is a subtle one between Robson and Harris on the beach, which is unsettling simply because it’s so muted and inconclusive. I like the way that Victoria responds so badly to the atmosphere of this story, rather than ones of more obvious jeopardies, and more and more forcefully questions why she wants to travel with the Doctor. And I like the fact that Megan Jones (the chairwoman of the company who owns the refinery) can be so initially dismissive of the crisis – but does so (unlike in a lot of Pertwee stories to come) not by looking like a fool or a bully, but by being someone who’s simply unable to recognise that there is that brooding tension we’ve had four episodes to get used to.
I think that’s where I’ve gone wrong with Fury, and why I found it so hard to get to grips with it. It’s taken the notion of a base in crisis, and played a game of nerves with its characters and with its audience. Something feels badly wrong, but it’s not going to give us the relief of a dead body, or a villain issuing threats in a hissing voice. (I’m a bit of a coward watching horror movies; I jump at the slightest noise, I put my hands over my eyes. All up ‘til the moment when I can see what level of gore the film is going to provide. Then the tension’s gone, and I can relax and take it all for granted. It’s the waiting for something nasty to happen that irks me. Fury from the Deep’s effect on me is limited because – yet again – I’m squinting at it through telesnaps. If it actually existed, I think I might have more quickly realised what it was trying to do.)
Great to see, too, in Megan Jones a strong female character who commands respect – and by doing so, isn’t either a defeminised automaton (as we’ll see in Brian Hayles’ stories), or a villain needing redemption. In its portrayal of a happy marriage, Victor Pemberton’s script seems far in advance of its Troughton-era brothers in the way that it tries to characterise real people in real relationships in as unforced a manner as possible.
T: “Waiting” seems to be the keyword for these latest episodes – as van Lutyens said at the end of episode two, “It’s down there, in the darkness, in the pipeline. Waiting.” Here, the Doctor talks about the peacefulness outside, the calm, and tells Victoria that they need to wait until they know how to tackle the weed. But the tension causes her to panic; they’re really putting Victoria through the wringer in this, which is great news for Deborah Watling, who gets some decent material for a change. And it’s a fair point, because in real life, meeting disaster head-on is nothing like as bad as anticipating that it might happen, and things are rarely as bad as you expect. The expectation is the most uncomfortable bit – and that’s what we have here in spades. Robson calmly waits on the beach, deadpanning his words to Harris before silently wandering off. When van Lutyens decides to have a peek in the Impeller, his justification is that “I can’t sit about waiting.” There’s so much waiting going on, in fact, that Jamie falls asleep.
Because the viewers themselves have also spent ages waiting, it’s really quite gripping when van Lutyens – having slowly investigated in the dark – gets sucked into the foam, his screams echoing up the shaft. Then the Doctor and Jamie go down to help, and we get that brilliant reveal that the technicians in charge of the lift are Oak and Quill (how fortunate for the story’s fear factor that the weed chose the two most incongruously scary looking technicians to take over first). What began quite slowly starts to pay off – Robson goes bonkers to the extent that Maddern can suggest some alien manipulation of his mind, causing a mental struggle; it’s a most convincing depiction of a man tipping over the edge. And Chief Baxter’s on-screen demise is rather horrifying, as everyone watches aghast, unable to do anything.
So the tension finally does break in this episode, and very much works in its favour. It’s a neat trick – it this hasn’t been the most comfortable experience up till now, that’s probably been the point. And it’s an instalment that finishes with the weed-parasite inveigling its way through the entire control rig as a stepping stone to its moving onto the British Isles, and possibly the entire planet. Perhaps I was wrong. Sometimes, things are as bad as you expect them to be.
Fury from the Deep episode five
R: I’m in love with Megan Jones. Head over heels. She’s so practical, so strong, and so decisive. Her very appearance in the story coincides with the seaweed monster actually pulling up its socks and doing something; even marine life wants to impress her. And the scene where she’s alone with Robson in his room, trying to get information – and her voice drops, and she softly tries to reassure him she’s an old friend – is one of the very best in the story. Her Welsh accent becomes more pronounced, and you can suddenly get this glimpse of a woman who’s had to suppress even her own background just so she can justify her position in a man’s world. It’s a terrific performance, by a terrific actress. Toby, you’re an actor, you know everybody. Could you fix me a date with Margaret John? Preferably as Megan, and not as the granny who got her face sucked off in The Idiot’s Lantern – but, you know, I’m not proud, whichever’s easiest.
Right, back to bed. I want to dream of forceful Welsh women tonight. And not Dudley Simpson. Thank you.
T: A friend of mine did a sitcom with Margaret John, and was perplexed by how excited I was when I found out. What’s great about her scene with Robson (apart from the fact that the six-part structure here affords it to us) is that when she gives him the tough, stern, buck-your-ideas-up-chum speech, she’s not doing it because she’s losing her temper – she’s trying to snap her old mate out of it by using the sort of approach he’d use on a wavering subordinate. Maddern builds upon last week’s great work when he sounds like he’s blindly flailing as he appeals for her help. It’s as if he’s trying to give the impression that the real Robson is in the dark, his mind being clouded over by this invasive creature.
You mentioned in episode one that context is everything, and that Fury from the Deep suffers as a result, but I’m less convinced of this. It’s become de rigueur of late to write off Season Five – the once much-lauded “Monster Season” – as a repetitive, formulaic bore-fest, but most of these adventures have used the “base under siege” template to fulfill different objectives. Tomb was a classic “get a small group together in a scary place to bump them off” tale, The Abominable Snowmen put an SF bent onto a mythical legend, The Ice Warriors addressed a “man vs. machine” ethical dilemma that worked within the plot and mirrored the subtext, whilst The Web of Fear was an action/adventure that sought to scare the beejesus out of you. But Fury from the Deep has been an exercise in mood – a steadily rising one started out at ominous, went to creepy and ramped up to anticipatory. And here at the end of episode five, as the Doctor and Jamie confront the nerve-centre of the weed and its minions, it looks like this thing from the deep is about to get really furious.
April 13th
Fury from the Deep episode six
R: I’ve got used to regular actors’ departures feeling like afterthoughts, and so am still reeling a
bit from this. The Doctor defeats the seaweed monster, of course – but that’s not even remotely what this episode’s about. He comes up with the solution a minute in, and it takes him about a quarter of an hour to implement it. The idea that it’s destroyed by the amplified recording of Victoria’s screams sounds rather twee and gimmicky in theory – but it’s only as you listen to the episode that it hits you how cruel a comment upon what Victoria’s been going through this really is: it’s the expression of all her fear, and all her unhappiness, cheerfully stuck onto tape and made into an emotionless weapon. After weeks of trying to get the Doctor’s attention, it’s as if he only properly notices how upset she is in order to use it. I don’t want to overstress this – but it’s telling that the story ends as triumphantly as it can, with everyone safe and alive and friends with each other, almost to form a contrast with the way Victoria feels. The expected jubilation we’d usually get at the monster’s defeat is tempered by the sound of Victoria dissolving into hysterics.
It’s abrupt, this decision of hers to live with a family she barely knows – but not abrupt in an Andred/Invasion of Time way, the story isn’t suddenly asking you to believe in a relationship which simply wasn’t there. Maggie Harris sounds polite but surprised when Victoria wants to be with them – the “stay as long as you want” invitation is one I’ve made to friends in difficulties before, but it usually has the unspoken addition “but don’t make it last for more than a fortnight” attached to it. That she goes off with strangers – not with a David Campbell, not with a Troilus – makes the stress Victoria’s been feeling seem all the more acute. And the last ten minutes focus upon the different reactions of the Doctor and Jamie. The scene where Jamie talks to Victoria that one last time – and then promises he won’t leave without saying a final goodbye – is full of pain and bravery and the confusion you associate with a break-up; the fact that, as far as the story is concerned, we never hear that goodbye almost makes a lie out of it. The Doctor instead is polite and practical; he’s already accepted she’s leaving before she knows it herself. That final scene in the TARDIS, with Jamie sulky and the Doctor defensive, and Victoria watching them silently from the beach, is heart-wrenching. We began the story with them fighting in foam, and all we’ll get from now on are convention anecdotes about how the trio played naughty tricks involving knickers in rehearsal – but at this point it’s a friendship fractured, and all the awkwardness of that comes clearly through. The protracted epilogue to this rather familiar monster tale is one of the most strikingly original things we’ve seen in Doctor Who for ages.
It’s not all hard emotion. The sequence with the Doctor flying the helicopter is gorgeous. Without the pictures accompanying it, all the screams and shouts – and the Doctor’s polite concern about how he can fly the thing – have a cartoon-like comedy to them. The fact we never find out how he lands, we just accept he does, means that this really is a great gag and not a bit of extra jeopardy. It’s delightful, and feels like it’s the programme giving one last burst of comic rapport for this terrific team.
T: At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to me how good this story is or isn’t. How do we define “good”, anyway? Something can have lyrical dialogue, splendid design, a well structured plot and fine acting, and inevitably someone will find it dull despite everything you can cite to the contrary. But you can’t really argue with someone’s opinion – I once saw a post on Outpost Gallifrey where someone listed their bottom, most-hated stories: Blink was on it, but Time-Flight was nowhere to be seen. And yet, how can I berate that person? I can’t – not without being a patronising oaf. No matter how well I might argue my case, how dare I tell someone that the entertainment value they did or didn’t derive from a piece of television is wrong? Sure, if you were to dissect the relative merits of Quatermass II and Gone With the Wind, the latter would win hands down, but that doesn’t stop a lot of people on most days (myself included) from preferring to stick Brian Donlevy, miscast or not, into their DVD player.
I’m laying out this context because I can’t deny that my experience of Fury this time around has felt a bit lacking. In particular, I think that having a silly helicopter chase in episode six, when the story is supposed to be reaching a climax, is unforgivable no matter how funny Troughton is, and how well shot the sequence might have been. It’s the equivalent of having comedy escapades whilst King Kong is atop the Empire State Building; there’s a time and a place for such shenanigans, and this is neither.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s great stuff here too. The final showdown with gallons of foam and the curious, thrashing creatures looks as though it could have been terrific, and it’s wonderful how they use the echoey pipes to transport the sound out to the rigs and destroy the weed’s nerve centre. Troughton puts in another gorgeous performance, Robson is restored to his old self (i.e. he’s still a bit of a git), and – just this once, Victoria – everybody lives! And in a story with such a slow build-up, the relaxed, domestic coda feels just right and should be cherished; it’s a rare moment of real-life in this fantastical series.
I could continue weighing the relative pros and cons of this story in some sort of cosmic scale of high geekery to determine its net value. I could. But actually, none of that is important, because I am so in love with what Fury from the Deep represents to me. It’s permeated so much of my Doctor Who life. I vividly remember being a huge know-it-all kid, convinced I knew everything about Who – I had read all of the Target novels that were available, so I knew of companions such as Ben, Polly and Liz Shaw that my friends (the poor fools) were ignorant of. Occasionally I was caught out – I brought a copy of Planet of the Daleks with me for company on a camping trip, but I’d yet to read it. My tent-mate looked at the first chapter and read aloud, “Jo Alone...”, whereupon I brashly informed him, “Oh, yes... Joe. He’s a great companion...”, and was then told, based on the evidence right there on the first page, that “Jo’s a she.”
After that, as you can imagine, I stuck to only talking about stories I actually knew. The problem being: there were a hell of a lot I didn’t know about. I got The Doctor Who Crossword Book and thought it’d be a doddle, then got tripped up on answers such as “Rider From Shang-Tu”. The Radio Times 20th Anniversary Special was very much an eye opener – look, it’s Peter Purves from Blue Peter in a stripey top, was he a companion then? Who’s this Dodo character? And there, tucked away in the synopses, was a small précis of Fury from the Deep. At the time it didn’t make much of an impact on me, but there was a picture elsewhere of the weed creature and it looked enormous – a swishing mass of nautical anger towering over a cowering character. (Imagine my disappointment years later, when I discovered that the man was a special-effects bod, and the creature itself wasn’t actually that big.)
But I still didn’t give the story much thought until an issue of Doctor Who Magazine promised that in the next issue, they’d be covering the “special novelisation” of Fury from the Deep. I wondered: what could be so special about it? A month later, DWM revealed that it was a “bumper edition”, which sounded terribly exciting. Unfortunately, Castle Bookshop in Ludlow – where I used to go sometimes go on a Saturday and rearrange the dozen or so Doctor Who novels they had into chronological order – had finally stopped stocking them. Fortunately, my friend Derek (a kindly handyman who’d do odd jobs for my Mum, and – after he innocently mentioned that he’d watched William Hartnell as a boy – put up with a jabbering child asking if he remembered the intricacies of The Daleks’ Master Plan) knew a man in Wolverhampton (Danny, a lovely bloke as it turned out) who was a Doctor Who fan. One day, I went with Derek to this man’s house, where he lent me a number of old Doctor Who Magazines (to my shame, I still have them!), and, for reasons lost on the mists of time, gave me a surplus copy of the new novel of Fury from the Deep!! The excitement was electrifying!! I read it and read it and read it, and judged that everything Gary Russell had said in his DWM review was right.
Sometime later, I learned that
you could get soundtracks on cassette from that shop I mentioned in Wolverhampton – the deal was that you took in take two C-90s and left with one full of crackly Doctor Who audio goodness (sans every other cliffhanger, sadly). I got a copy of Fury from the Deep – my first choice, of course – that made everyone’s voices a pitch higher or lower. Abineri sounded like a baritone, Maddern like a chimney sweep, and it was so warbly it sounded like the weed’s heartbeat punctuated almost the entire story. I huddled next to my cassette player, trying to discern what went on... and the pictures I conjured were multi-million dollar and as scary as hell. I was thrilled, I was elated, but I was also frustrated that I couldn’t see it. I was intrigued by the mystique of the missing episodes, and prone to fantasise (as I still am, frankly) about their return. And as I’ve mentioned before, the recovered censor clips of this story eventually proved as terrifying as anything I had imagined.
In one fashion or another, Fury from the Deep continued following me. Anyone who has seen or heard Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf knows that I’ve always had a thing about John Abineri – I even taped highlights of an episode of Forever Green because he played the guest baddie and got top guest billing. I even had a brief dalliance with a girl at university who was his niece (which I promise was completely unrelated to his CV; I’m weird, but not that weird). Much later, when I was in Bath performing Moths, I was introduced to a man whose father had “been a Time Lord in Doctor Who with Patrick Troughton”. I cockily reeled off the names Bernard Horsfall, Trevor Martin and Clyde Pollitt, but found that he was Graham Leaman’s son! So actually, he was a Time Lord for Jon Pertwee, but guest-starred in Fury. I quizzed Giles Leaman about his Dad, and find out little nuggets about one of Doctor Who’s most prolific odd-job actors. Months later, I was performing Moths in Westcliffe-On-Sea, and by sheer happenstance, the sound man saw the cue “John Abineri’s niece” in the script and said that his mate Seb who lived down the road had that surname. Phone calls were made, and an absolutely delighted Sebastian Abineri (no slouch as an actor himself) bought me a drink and we had a wonderful chat. I subsequently got a lovely email saying how thrilled he was to have gone back to tell his family, and that his Dad would have been really proud and loved the show.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 59