Doctor Who - The Underwater Menace by Nigel Robinson

Published: July 1988

To be truthful, the original story didn’t exactly offer Robinson many gifts- Zaroff apart, there are no really compelling characters (in fact, there aren’t very many who go through the story from beginning to end) and of the others, Thous is weak (and effectively confined to the second half of the story), Lolem was clearly written as a cliche and only made memorable in the finished story by Peter Stephens’s outrageous performance and Ara is another who struggles to show a second dimension. A cursory search reveals that Geoffrey Orme wrote a single ‘Avengers’ episode, which surprised me- from the style of writing, missing scientists engaged on secret and destructive projects and so on, I’d have thought he’d have done more, not least because the writing seems to be a strange twist on the Avengers rule of not introducing a character unless they furthered the plot. In ‘The Underwater Menace’, however, characters seem to be introduced and then disposed of solely because they serve a purpose in the plot, so rather than three or four who could be developed properly, we end up with the best part of a dozen caricatures. The dialogue is similarly functional- which is another way of saying that it wouldn’t surprise me if Julia Smith had kept a blind eye to her actors going over the top in an attempt to give their characters at least some personality, so perhaps it needed Joseph Furst to overplay every line and Peter Stephens to turn in a performance of quite such dazzling campness.

Nevertheless, it’s important to point out at this stage that Robinson treats his source material with a basic respect, never trying to undercut the lines or situations from the original script. Another of the weaknesses of the televised story is that the production team hadn’t quite worked out how the Troughton era was going to feel, so while in the early stages in particular there’s a strong sense of this Doctor’s childlike qualities (taking his bucket and spade to the beach and going paddling), and later in the story he makes some amazing intuitive leaps (such as deducing Zaroff’s presence from the use of plankton as food) it isn’t done as seamlessly as in later stories, once his tendency to skylark around to distract the villains had been established. Of necessity, though, the novelisation is about the story rather than the characters- Geoffrey Orme’s original scripts emphasise action rather than character or atmosphere, and losing the visuals means that the book does end up as quite a pacy little read. There are clever little insights into the inner lives of some of the characters, though- Zaroff’s disappearance and the recriminations between East and West which it provoked, also the loss of his family, do hint at a rationale behind his nihilistic insanity, while the backstories of characters like Ramo and Ara also give an insight into the lives of ordinary Atlanteans and show Robinson making a more rewarding package out of the story. So while you might not be able to make a silk purse out of the proverbial porcine auditory organ, as Nigel Robinson shows, if you approach an unpromising task with commitment and attention to detail, sometimes the end result is quite acceptable.