In 1978, Time-Life Television offered a package of Tom Baker’s first four Doctor Who seasons – 98 episodes – to American TV stations. Because they thought the show was a little too esoteric or something, they hired an actor named Howard da Silva to provide narrations, voiceovers and recaps, using a very distinctive, deliberate enunciation. Some fans collect these otherwise lost versions, I guess in the same way that some people want to collect the American prints of EastEnders with the Tracy Ullman introductions.
From time to time, when the organization that holds the rights to a show wants to assemble a new package, some rogue prints turn up. Some of the apparent master tapes of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters have introductions from a later syndication package, and, as we’ll discuss in this space soon, A&E had a big ole mess when they started showing the Tara King episodes of The Avengers in the early 1990s. In 1982, Lionheart Television put together a new package of the Tom Baker stories, offering 41 edited TV movies or the half-hour episodes. Somehow, they included the Howard da Silva print of part two of “Underworld” in the compilation movie.
I remember that when WGTV showed this in 1984, I had actually just stepped out of the room for a second and heard this weird voice, right when the Minyans’ spaceship crashes through the planet’s liquid surface. Something like “The Doctor and his friends pah-lunge intoooo the Unnnnderworrrrld…” It took me years to figure out what that dopey narration was doing on the show.
Anyway, once the Doctor and his friends plunge into the Underworld, the same thing happens that we saw in Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s previous Who script, “The Invisible Enemy.” The first episode of this story is tremendously entertaining. I liked it a lot. Good performances, good sets, a good sense of mystery. Then they step out of the spaceship in episode two and everything falls apart.
Infamously, the actors don’t step out into tunnels and caverns built in the studio. They step out into a blue screen environment of photographs of tunnels and caverns. Speaking of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, this is honestly the closest that Doctor Who ever came to looking like a late period Sid and Marty Krofft program, when they didn’t have any money either. Our son wasn’t impressed, and nobody else is, for that matter. Even with K9, this one’s pretty dull.
Old business: For those of you who remember my post about “The Brain of Morbius” and its suggestion that there were other Doctors before William Hartnell, I had said that nothing is shown onscreen to contradict it until “Mawdryn Undead” in 1983. However, an online acquaintance who goes by the handle “Forever Love” – a fantastic LP, by the way – drew my attention to an exchange in this story, where the Doctor says that he’s only regenerated “two or three times,” and not “ten or eleven.” Sounds like more evidence that my son was right and those other eight dudes we saw were the early incarnations of Morbius!
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 