Doctor Who V:29-30: Fury from the Deep, episodes 1 and 2

I acquired the reconstruction of this story from Loose Cannon a few months ago, but have taken my time in watching it. Two episodes in, Fury from the Deep is living up to expectations. Safe at unconsequential teatime, Victor Pemberton's writing digs at the contradictions in the series format at this time while making the most of its limitations. This base under siege is threatened from within and without, and headed by the most credibly ill-tempered of a series of commanders. Robson's aggression would have been very familiar to the post-war generation; a member of one elite, the practical men who had worked their way up to the top by hard work and applied experience, fearing that he would be undermined and eclipsed by the new officer class of university men, issuing with schoolroom learning from an ever-expanding sector to take up places in the technocracy. As if this wasn't enough, Robson's authority is compromised by diplomatic exigencies: Euro Sea Gas is not simply a British exercise, and Robson has to cope with the interventions of the Dutch representative Van Lutyens. The craggy-featured Victor Maddern, a veteran of merchant and royal navies, looks as if he knows the type well.

Fury from the Deep is a ghost story for the technological age. There is knocking in the pipes; friends not seen for a long time make contact, but talk in whispers like ghosts. In a series where possession is usually instantaneous, Maggie Harris's battle with the seaweed's influence has some power, and her subjection by technicians from her husbands' employers is subversive for children (if Laurel and Hardy, of whom Pemberton is a fan, were as familiar to children in 1968 as they were in the 1970s) and their parents, accustomed to having engineers visit (as Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles note in volume two of About Time) from the gas boards to install or upgrade supply; the model society envisaged by futurologists of the time may well have included regular intervention by gadget-wielding engineers from benevolent authorities.

Juxtaposed against the intelligent, responsible professionals, from the aggressive to the conciliatory to the doggedly diligent, are the three regulars: wide-eyed children set among the grown-ups to ask the questions which have been socialised out of the guest characters' brains, and necessarily so. The threat of the foam is softened by having Jamie and the Doctor throw Victoria into it early on, but I expect most of those watching soon forgot that scene, particularly after the three playmates were shot by the gas project's security devices. Victoria does not do too badly; she proves a dab hand with a hairpin, despite Jamie's mocking, and it's not her fault the next lock she meets is beyond her.