In 1971 a documentary film about Great White sharks called Blue Water,White Death was released in the cinemas. This was in the days before the Discovery Channel, and as colour TV in the UK was not yet the norm, the BBC's Natural History Unit was still some years away from making its name. The Sunday Times ran an article in its magazine section to promote the film, and it was illustrated with a large grey/blue photograph over the two centre pages. It was a huge close up of the open jaws of a Great White as seen through the bars of a shark cage - so close, in fact, that the tip of the shark's snout was cut off by the top of the page. The eyes of the fish were an impenetrable black ("Like a doll's eyes.") and the teeth were cruel bone-white triangles. I bent back the staples and eased the photo out of the magazine as if it was a centrefold, and stuck it to my bedroom wall, where it remained for years until we moved house. When I took it down, the hardened Blu-Tack peeled the paint away from the wall. I don't have the picture anymore and, no matter how many imaginative word search variations I've typed into Google Images, I've never been able to track it down. Not that I really need to. The image is seared into my visual memory.
As for the film itself, I have a vague memory that it was released on a double bill with the science fiction film Fantastic Voyage. There is an association in my mind of Great White sharks with miniaturized submarines, which I can only assume is the result of some imaginative programming by the film distributors. Even with a dearth of good nature documentaries on TV, it was probably still difficult to lure people into the cinema to see a documentary about fish without the bait of Raquel Welch in a white catsuit.
