Episode 12
Comedy Accents
Sunday 26 October 2014
Our flight through Season 4 continues, plunging underwater and crash landing on the moon with The Highlanders, The Underwater Menace and The Moonbase. Nothing in ze vorld can stop us now!
Buy the stories!
Yet again, no episodes of The Highlanders exist. However, the audio survives, of course, and has been released by the BBC with a linking narration by Frazer Hines. (Audible US) (Audible UK)
Things get even more complicated with The Underwater Menace. Episode 3 was included in the Lost in Time box set. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK). Episode 2 was rediscovered in 2011, and is the only extant episode of the entire show not yet released on DVD [citation needed]. An audio version exists, narrated by the charming Anneke Wills. (Audible US) (Audible UK)
The Moonbase has been released on DVD, with passable animated versions of the missing episodes 1 and 3. (Amazon US) (Amazon UK)
The Highlanders
Oh my God. Here’s Hannah Gordon singing The Windmills of Your Mind on Morecambe & Wise in 1973.
The Underwater Menace
Thunderball, the fourth Bond film, released just before this story screened, spends a massive 20.8% of its running time underwater. Yawn.
Other thrilling underwater frolics are also available here: Gerry Anderson’s Stingray and Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, starring Barbara Eden.
Here is a lovely picture of some Fish People.
And here, from the BBC website, is the scene between Troughton and Professor Zaroff from episode 2.
Geoffrey Orme wrote some screenplays for the increasingly mental Old Mother Riley film series in the 30s, 40s and 50s, but, sadly, not the one where she meets Bela Lugosi as a vampire.
The Moonbase
David Banks wrote an exhausting history of the Cybermen which was published in the 1990s. (Amazon UK). So there’s that then.
The first episode of The Avengers featuring the Cybernauts is availiable in full, probably illegally, on Dailymotion. (Sadly no longer.)
The delightful Damian Shanahan is responsible for finding many surviving clips from otherwise lost episodes, clips that were cut from the program by the ABC’s censors because they were too violent. You can read about this on Steve Phillips’s Doctor Who Clips List website, where the surviving clips are exhaustively catalogued.
Follow us!
Follow us on Twitter, or on Facebook. Check out our website at flightthroughentirety.com. And consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes.