Much of this waterlogged adventure is lost, and we may not be the worse for it...

Prefab Sprout once sang about Looking For Atlantis. Well, all they had to do was check out the Doctor Who archives - which unfortunately still has yet to explore the concepts of hot dogs and jumping frogs.

Atlantis - or rather its destruction - seems to crop up quite a bit in the first 10 years of Doctor Who. Azal bellows at The Master (and presumably everyone else on the planet, taking his foghorn voice into account) to RRRREMEMBER ATTTTLAAAANTISSS!!! One season later, The Master’s curiously engineered the destruction of Atlantis by setting an overgrown budgerigar loose. Hmmm, lots of parallel Atlantises I guess.

To add insult to injury, Atlantis was already a goner in the hokey Season Four adventure The Underwater Menace. This was in the days before The Master did his whole “Look into my eyes, Not around the eyes, You’re back in the room” routine. Instead, it’s down to the villainous actions of hammy loon Professor Zaroff, a man who makes the Batman villains look Shakesperean by comparison.

Zaroff has a fiendishly clever plan: He has managed to dupe the Atlanteans into thinking that he can successfully raise their city from the sea. When in fact, he plans to drain the ocean into the molten core of the planet, causing more fireworks than an average episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Quite why the Atlanteans fall for this guff in the first place is anybody’s guess. Zaroff’s about as reliable as a train service in the middle of a snowy blizzard. Zaroff’s typical B-Movie madman material: He shouts. He kills. He struts around proclaiming his own self-brilliance at the top of his voice, and what’s more seems to be channelling Foghorn Leghorn in that he keeps repeating himself twice. “Haven’t I??!? Haven’t I??!?” “You… you demand? You demand???!?” Only a madman could think that everyone else lost their hearing a long time ago.

The problem is, there’s absolutely no depth to Zaroff, and his own mad scheme makes absolutely no sense. Apparently, earlier drafts indicated that the crazed genius lost his wife and children in a car accident. Which, in context, would have made far more sense in dramatic terms. To leave out this small bit of back story is a classic mistake in that it just reduces Zaroff to a ridiculous panto baddie who chooses to destroy the planet - well, because he can really.

"A whopping great folly, The Underwater Menace is 100 minutes of badly made, clichéd tat - a bit like being force fed a plate of mouldy ham sandwiches by a shouty Brian Blessed in Santa’s Grotto"

Joseph Furst really had a whopping great task to salvage any dignity from this character, and sadly, despite his impressive film career, failed on this occasion. Not his fault by any means - when you’ve got page after page of stock ranting cliché thrown at you, there’s absolutely nothing you can do. Although the oft-quoted final line of Episode Three isn’t quite as hammy as I expected (He doesn’t actually pronounce the line “Nuzzeeenk in zeee voyld can stop meee naaahhh!!” that way).

Zaroff’s ineptitude sums up The Underwater Menace beautifully. A whopping great folly, The Underwater Menace is 100 minutes of badly made, clichéd tat - a bit like being force fed a plate of mouldy ham sandwiches by a shouty Brian Blessed in Santa’s Grotto. Incredibly, the third episode was apparently retained in the BBC archives, while all trace of a classic like The Power Of The Daleks went up in flames.

The reason for Episode 3’s survival is that bizarre sequence which comes in the middle of the episode. Yes, the Fish People’s dance, a sequence that bypasses the laws of time in that it seems to drag on for about 10 years (when in fact it’s only on for about a minute and a half). This is probably down to the sequence being so cringe-inducingly bad. The Fish People - basically genetically augmented food harvesters for the natives - look rubbish: A cross between a ballet dancer who’s been in an argument with tin foil and Mr Magoo. In a story that already has too much padding, we are treated to a sequence in which the Fish People bounce up and down on very obvious Kirby wires in front of what looks like a children’s end-of-term play backdrop - all to the strains of what sounds like an Orang-Utan dunking a Bontempi organ in and out of a full-up bathtub. Not the finest moment for Doctor Who, needless to say.

Not that any of The Underwater Menace actually manages to impress. The characterisation is poor across the board, as stagy actors blunder around the set, uttering hackneyed, unbelievable lines. For example, it only takes until the end of Episode Three for Thous to realise that Zaroff is one sardine short of a tin. “The Doctor was… right about you!” Wow, no kidding - naturally, Thous is shot on the spot.

It’s actually difficult to pick out the silliest character in Menace. There’s Zaroff naturally. Sean, the stereotypical Irishman. Or Lolem, the High Priest, again played by Peter Stephens (Cyril from The Celestial Toymaker) who now resembles a cross between Christopher Biggins and a transvestite antelope. None of the characters manage to come alive, and what’s worse, the regulars aren’t exactly at their best either.

"Patrick Troughton has easily settled into his role, and makes the most of the tosh that he’s given to say"

Ben seems to be battling it out with Jamie to see who can get the most lines. Polly does nothing apart from whinge and shriek, like a 5-year-old girl who’s left clutching at the gates on her first day at school. Even The Doctor doesn’t get to do much, although he’s still going through his Leclerc phase, dressing up in ridiculous Atlantean head-dress and robe, and then pretending to be a hobo gypsy with the aid of some of the funkiest shades this side of Ray Charles. Although it’s not the best of stories for the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton has easily settled into his role, and makes the most of the tosh that he’s given to say.

Apart from this, surely there must be something of worth in The Underwater Menace? Well, I like the opening sequence in which the TARDIS crew muse to themselves on where they have landed this time. Some of the surviving clips look a bit near the knuckle. I bet kids waiting to go into hospital wouldn’t have liked the scenes of Polly struggling on the operating table for Episode 1’s cliffhanger. And Zaroff’s final demise looks remarkably well staged too. The interior designs of the temple look quite good as well, and look a lot larger in scale than you might think. Talking of the temple scenes, it sounds like the grandparents of Gold Almighty’s Pompous Choir have been let loose in the recording booth, chanting like constipated madmen in the background.

The Underwater Menace, is, for the most part, though, a chore. Bad acting and wonky effects I can forgive if there’s a good plot, characterisation and dialogue to be had. The Underwater Menace fails drastically on all three counts, instead providing a wooden, unconvincing runaround. Not so much a lavish salmon en croute, more a tin of sardines that passed its sell-by date some time ago.

John Bensalhia limbered up for this mammoth task with a full four-series review of Blake's 7, and writes professionally and recreationally all over the web. Check out his portfolio of work at Wordprofectors.

Check out John's previous Doctor Who review, The Highlanders