or A Damp Youth Remembered

Today’s post is dedicated to those weird and exciting nautical fictions which started a lifelong interest in aquatic adventures (mostly from an armchair). A couple of weeks ago I talked about growing up on the North Sea coast, and the way in which its bleakness and legends creep up on you (whale-road, widow-maker).

This time I want to expose the soul of a little boy. The authorities wouldn’t let me do that, sadly, and then they took away all my knives, even the one for de-boning chickens. So instead, I’ll just tell you about the joys of encountering some key books, TV and comics when I was young, and the other reason why we have a Stranger Seas theme…

One: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

This wonderful film, originally from 1953, is probably the first real monster film that stuck with me, far more exciting at the time than vampire or werewolf films. The entire concept of a super-dinosaur, the fictional rhedosaurus, being revived seemed almost possible to my tiny mind. I didn’t actually believe that vampires existed, but gosh, there had been dinosaurs, and scientists did odd things, so maybe this could really happen!

Typically, the rhedosaurus is released from hibernation by an atomic test in the Arctic. Feeling peeved, it swims and tramples its way south, heading for New York. Why? Well, it likes sailors and it wants to spawn. Something like that.

With stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen, how could it go wrong? I should also mention, given my lighthouse keeper father, that the film includes an exciting scene where the rhedosaurus destroys a lighthouse. Clever listeners will know that this part is based on Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Foghorn. Quite frankly, I wasn’t sure whether to root for the lighthouse or the dinosaur.

I have a slight problem nowadays in that I make 20,000 fathoms to be nearly 23 miles. As the Pacific Ocean’s Marianas Trench reaches a depth of 6.8 miles, wouldn’t that have put the poor dinosaur somewhere in earth’s crust, entombed in solid rock?

Two: Stingray

This hardly needs explaining, surely? The adventures of Troy, Phones and Marina were obligatory viewing. Made between 1964 and 1965 with Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation technique, Stingray was a bit more realistic than Fireball XL5, and to me at the time, almost possible.

Human submarines were fine and dandy, but what I truly loved was the whole undersea menace of the aquaphibians and their mechanical fish. Races from the deep, advanced and ready to do battle with mankind. Yes please.

It was only while checking out the release dates and cast for Stingray that I discovered one of those pieces of trivia that we love at greydogtales. A number of the voices on Stingray were provided by David Graham (his performance as Oink the seal was not, alas, one of the highspots of his work). And David Graham was also the voice of my favourite non-aquatic monsters, the mechonoids from Dr Who.

Shown gloriously in the series The Chase, I loved the mechonoids. Robots/constructs who could take on the daleks, with their cool geodesic look and their wonderful futuristic city. At times I wanted the mechonoids to win and become the new major enemy for the Doctor.

Graham went on to provide voices for many beloved shows, and is, rather astonishingly, the voice of Parker in the animated series Thunderbirds are Go, made in 2015. At the age of 90. That is impressive.

Three: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Made between 1964 and 1968, this TV show was Stingray in (sort of) real life – bigger, tougher and fighting to save the planet from sea-borne or sea-focussed threats. Obviously knowing my tastes, despite the political and espionage issues the crew faced, every so often the writers would throw in aliens, sea monsters, dinosaurs and ghosts to threaten the wonderful submarine Seaview.

Sadly, the wiring on the Seaview had not been checked to EEC standards, and any slight turbulence resulted in sparks, smoke and major electrical breakdown. They got through an awful lot of fire extinguishers, I seem to remember.

Four: Hornblower

Not weird, perhaps, but maritime and an inescapable influence. My father had a lot of books, though it wasn’t exactly a literary collection, more a bit of everything, from Zane Grey to Dennis Wheatley (we’ll come back to him). He did, to my delight, have all the C S Forester Hornblower books in print, and I read the lot. Many, many times, as Betty Marsden used to say on Round the Horne.

To add to the pleasure of disappearing up your own rigging for hours on end, in 1951 they had made the one Hornblower film at that time, and it came up on TV fairly often. With the insanely wild title of Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N., and starring Gregory Peck, it was thrills, laughs and harrumphs from start to finish.

I still re-read the Hornblower books, although they don’t have many ghosts or aliens in them, which is perhaps their one shortcoming. As for the films, our editor-in-chief has a marked preference for the Ioan Gruffud versions. I’m not sure that she’s paying much attention to the plots, though.

Five: Sea Devils

A split entry here, because I came across both the Dr Who Sea Devils series on TV (1972) and the DC comic of the same name at about the same time.

Dr Who gets precedence. With Jon Pertwee in full ruffed-shirt dandy mode, and Roger Delgado as the Master, this was top stuff. The scene where the Sea Devils themselves rose from the sea reminded me of the Dr Who film where the daleks come out of the Thames. I loved the reptile-house-and-trawler look they had going, and the weapons which weren’t shaped like human guns, giving them a definitely different vibe. Two years before, the Doctor had encountered their equally ancient cousins, the Silurians, and now the Master was urging the fin-heads up from the deep to take on mankind. Pure pleasure.

As I was fourteen or fifteen at the time, it would be wrong not to mention the gorgeous Katy Manning as Jo. The Jon Pertwee/Katy Manning period of Dr Who was one of my favourites, and still is. I’m sure that my excitement had absolutely nothing to do with Katy bending over a lot in tight denim jeans, or those adolescent surges of hormonal madness. I was an intellectual child, wasn’t I? The fact that she later posed naked with daleks also left me entirely unaffected, apart from the need for cold showers and urgent medication…

Whilst digging up Silurian dirt, I also noticed that the nice people at Big Finish Productions (remember the new Carnacki?) have a nautical adventure available – Bloodtide. The Sixth Doctor and Evelyn meet Charles Darwin on the Galapagos, where newly-awakened Silurians have horrifying plans for mankind. Who Evelyn is I have no idea.

bloodtide on audio

I was a huge fan of US comics, and so the other nautical link here is to the DC Comic The Sea Devils. Unusually for my collection, this was a team of conventional adventurers, with no superpowers, in undersea exploits.

They were created by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Russ Heath, and were fun. Short on invulnerability etc, they swam along facing some mundane problems and the occasional alien or monster. A bit like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea but without knowing where their massive nuclear submarine had gone.

I like the fact that they were called things like Dane Dorrance and Biff Bailey. People in the UK did not have these type of names. Actually, I’ve never yet met anyone called Dane or Biff, so I might be missing out. And I seem to remember that they did have a green skinned amphibian in some episodes, so they fit the weird bill (better than Hornblower, anyway).

Six: They Found Atlantis

We’re still talking my childhood here. Dennis Wheatley’s book They Found Atlantis (1964) was a sort of icky, scary forbidden book nicked from my father’s shelf when I was young. It had hideous creatures in it, and sex!!! It made a big, if somewhat unpleasant impression on me. I found the uninhibited sex puzzling but arousing, and the monstrous bits very scary. Ever since then I have point-blank refused to date flesh-eating, stinking, grey-white fishmen.

The crucial point is that, unlike many teasing titles of the time, they do find Atlantis. Which is a weird place. It’s not as good as his black magic books, being half political-type thriller and half mad science fiction. I have a feeling that if I read it again it would be a bit meh! I could be wrong.

Seven: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

It seemed appropriate to start with 20,000 fathoms and end with 20,000 leagues. We’re talking the film here, not the book. I read Jules Verne’s story some time later, but my sponge-like young brain was greatly taken by James Mason’s magnificent Captain Nemo. Filmed in 1954, it has the coolest submarine, the Nautilus – better than Stingray, more steam-punk fun than Seaview.

Once again the title measurements puzzled me, given that 20,000 leagues is about 69,000 miles. Thankfully someone pointed out that the leagues referred to distance travelled whilst underwater, not how far down they went. A relief, because otherwise they would have become a spaceship.

James Mason is of course superb, and you’re on his side all the way. Still a very enjoyable film, and you get Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre thrown in. I’m fairly sure you’ll find that the aquaphibian’s spy in Stingray was modelled on Peter Lorre, as well. Sure sounds like him.

In conclusion, all I can say is that if you slam all those together by the time you are in your teens, you have the making of Stranger Seas. What you do with it then is anybody’s guess…