Doctor Who A-Z #62: The Sea Devils (1972)

We’re exactly halfway through Jon Pertwee’s tenure as Doctor now. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to disagree with the consensus on this period of the show so far, and there’ll be even more of that in the second half of Pertwee’s run. Mostly I’ve disagreed in a way which favours the episodes, but the flip-side is this: if the consensus is wrong when it decides which elements and stories of the Pertwee years are terrible, it might just be wrong when it decides which ones are great. So it goes with Malcolm Hulke’s second Silurian story. Those who saw it as a child – self included – have fond memories of it, but revisiting it I found it a slog to get through.

It’s easy to see why people might love The Sea Devils. There is a type of Doctor Who story which stays with you for life on the basis of one or two unforgettable set pieces – here, the Sea Devils rising from the ocean, and the Doctor and the Master’s sword fight. But there are also plenty of reasons why an older, more discerning viewer might also choose this as one of the best of its era. It is the only Third Doctor story set on Earth which features no appearance of UNIT, which means that if the Doctor’s relationship with UNIT sets your teeth on edge (and it does for some) this is your best shot at actually enjoying all those straightforwardly fun ingredients of the Earthbound stories – military action and vehicle chases, Roger Delgado’s Master manipulating humans, etc. – without the problematic bit getting in the way.

For me, watching The Sea Devils only reminded me how much UNIT add to this version of the show, not least this: when a trusted ally like the Brigadier is around, the Doctor does not have to spend a full two-thirds of the story trying to convince the Navy that this week’s monsters exist. A lot of The Sea Devils is just maddeningly repetitive, and the guest characters are among the thickest in Doctor Who history. Keeping the Master in a human prison was never going to work at the best of times, but you expect his escape to involve something a bit more crafty than hiding under a rug in the back of a car. You do wonder what the Navy, who are thanked for their co-operation in the end credits to every episode, thought when they saw their portrayal here. It’s also worth asking whether using the Navy instead of UNIT means denying us a thornier but more interesting story, one where the Silurians actually get to confront the Brigadier about his massacre of their brethren.

At least the show’s other regular ally Jo Grant is more competent than usual, although it’s anyone’s guess whether this is a conscious attempt to strengthen the character or simply that even a ditz like Jo can run rings around the morons guarding the Master. For all I love Malcolm Hulke he certainly has his weak spots as a writer: female characters are among them, and he can also be dismayingly content with filling out the run-time with characters being captured and escaping ad nauseam. This will be less of an issue in his next story Frontier in Space, which at least includes enough competing factions to ensure the Doctor and Jo are at least being captured by different people. The Sea Devils has the Doctor, Jo, a load of idiots, and the Master, and this is one of those Master stories where every potentially interesting secondary villain turns out to be a puppet of his.

This is the criticism I least want to make, but I have to: this shouldn’t have been a Master story. I know, I know, it’s the one where he has a sword-fight with the Doctor, and watches The Clangers, and of course it goes against my every instinct to say this show should have one less appearance by Roger Delgado. I’m just not convinced he’s the right character for this story. The Silurians – and the Sea Devils are Silurians, with their more common name being given to them by a frightened human – were conceived as a more morally ambiguous type of Doctor Who monster, one who the Doctor could debate and reason with. For all Pertwee and Delgado are at the peak of their comic chumminess here, the Master is not yet a character who can bear much moral ambiguity. He’s a bad man who wants bad things, which in turn makes the Silurians clearly bad for going along with his very bad plan to wipe out humanity in a nuclear holocaust. 

Compared to the ones we’ve seen before, then, these Silurians are just monsters, albeit weirdly endearing ones with string vests and a belief (superstition?) that they can tell if someone’s lying by putting their hand on the back of the speaker’s head. Director Michael E Briant does a fine job building suspense by keeping them in the shadows for the first two episodes, and as noted above the big set-piece of them emerging from the sea is the sort of thing that becomes a life-long memory when watched as a child. On the production side, it can’t be faulted – even the stock footage feels of a piece with the rest of the serial. The Pertwee era saw the show’s central creative triad of producer, script editor and star remain the same for the longest period in the classic series’s run, and perhaps this is part of why people find it so conservative. But there’s no question that, by this halfway mark, everyone knows what they’re doing.

It’s a safe, professional quality that Hulke just can’t rise above. For fans, he’s a fascinating figure: a writer of military-themed children’s adventure stories who nevertheless had politics way to the left of anyone Tim Davie will allow past the BBC’s door. During his life, though, his nickname was “Hack Mulke”, a man valued less for his complex and contradictory worldview and more for his ability to turn this stuff out by the yard. The Sea Devils sees him doing exactly that, and although I can understand why people love it, it still strikes me as one of his less interesting works.

Next: The Mutants (1972).

Graham’s Archive – The Sea Devils

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