Art Gallery: Fury from the Deep

Art Gallery 4

Along with The Web of Fear, Evil of the Daleks and Power of the Daleks, Fury from the Deep is mourned as one of the lost Troughton greats. Fan wisdom decrees that it is an all-time classic, and certainly surviving clips paint a picture of lingering horror. This sequence with Mr Oak and Mr Quill is quite probably the scariest scene ever depicted in Doctor Who.

Those stories unceremoniously junked during the sixties and seventies automatically attain an almost mythical status. Chances are that we will never see them again, although the return last year of episodes of Galaxy 4 and The Underwater Menace means that we will always live in hope. Off-air soundtracks and John Cura’s telesnaps offer tantalising glimpses of what we have lost, along with the few censor-snipped segments that still exist.

The loss of Fury from the Deep is by all accounts a terrible loss for Doctor Who fans and Troughton aficionados in particular. So the Target novelisation by Victor Pemberton was duly greeted with bated breath and deeper-than-usual analysis upon its release in 1986.

However, it is not the contents that interest us but the front cover. It could have shown many things; the helicopter sequence, Mr Oak and Mr Quill, Victoria screaming, the Doctor in a woolly hat, Maggie walking into the sea and so on. All of these are iconic moments and scenes, made doubly so by the fact that most likely they are lost forever.

Yet artist David McAllister chooses to avoid all of these iconic images in favour of creating his own. Fury from the Deep’s cover sees a lonely oil rig standing by a mist-wreathed coastline, whilst in the foreground a tuft of seaweed reaches out of the waves, looking for all the world like hands reaching up from the ocean. It’s a somehow haunting image, effective in its simplicity. By not going overboard and smothering the cover in something approaching a ‘Greatest Hits of Fury’ compilation as some Target covers tended to become, McAllister allows his artwork to subliminally suggest the plotline, so that those great moments weren’t spoiled before the reader had even started the book. Its starkness symbolises a deeper, more mature story, and gives due honour to this missing classic.

Fury from the Deep may be lost, but we are lucky to have such a complete record of its images and plot, as we are with all the missing stories. Very few series with lost episodes are documented half as well as Doctor Who. At least we can experience those destroyed episodes in some shape or form. It’s not the same as actually watching them, but it’s better than nothing.

We are also lucky that the concept sketch didn’t go on to become the actual cover. Fury from the Deep deserves better than a picture of the Doctor after someone has sneezed on his nice woolly hat...

(Image reproduced from The Target Book by Telos Publishing. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing out on a brilliant history of the Target novelisations. Get on Amazon right now!)