THE ADVENTURE GAME
Gra tenalp rof draoba lla! Come on, don’t be backwards now…
Created to help fill the Swap Shop-shaped gap on Saturday mornings in the summer of 1980,
The Adventure Game represented the very best of a certain kind of BBC can-do attitude. From the fecund mind of producer Patrick Dowling and marshalling the modest resources of the Children’s department, it fused a burgeoning interest in computer games and Dungeons & Dragons with a Douglas Adamsesque sensibility to create a format that current TV would call “reality”. However, it was anything but. Every week, two familiar telly faces – such as Fred Harris, Noel Edmonds or Blake’s 7’s Paul Darrow – plus a member of the public, would arrive on the planet Arg (in reality, BBC Bristol for series one and three, and Birmingham’s Pebble Mill Studios for two and four), where they would be challenged by dragon-like Argonds to complete a series of problem-solving tasks, before they could return to Earth.
The aliens could change shape, and thus appeared mainly in human form. For the first three series, the unflappable Charmian Gradwell embodied one of them – Gnoard.
“I was a drama student at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School when the show was piloting,” she tells SFX today, “and they asked for groups of students to come in and dummy-run each puzzle. This enabled the crew to see the sort of scenarios that might transpire.”
Having demonstrated an affinity for the concept, Dowling and director Ian Oliver offered her a presenting role on the show.
Despite the artifice, a key element of The Adventure Game was that contestants had no prior knowledge of the tasks, and genuinely had to solve them on camera.
“They would make us presenters try them first in rehearsal,” continues Gradwell, “so that we understood how things worked. It was great fun to do, and necessary, in order to be able to respond and improvise on the spot when we were actually shooting.”
The regulars – who also included, in season one, future TV newsreader Moira Stuart as the boiler-suited Darong – were required to stay in character, but also gently guide players if they were struggling. For Gradwell, maintaining the fiction was the easy part, “but it was hard to listen intently, respond and talk to the contestants on set, while simultaneously being told other things through my earpiece.”
In 1981, the second series switched to Monday teatimes on BBC Two, and featured Dowling himself welcoming explorers to Birmingham, before they were popped on board an intergalactic railway carriage and dispatched to Arg. In a lovely twist, series one contestant Lesley Judd had been retained, apparently in need of rescue. In fact, she was an Argond mole.
This run also introduced the iconic final round, in which players faced the Vortex. A variant of the centuries-old “fox” board game, it transposed the turnabout gameplay to a lattice hanging over outer space, with an invisible “fox” – the Vortex (visualised for viewers via rudimentary graphics) – stalking the player.
The third series began in 1984, with reshuffled personnel. Although he retained an overview of the show, Dowling moved on to be succeeded by Oliver as producer. He, in turn, brought in former Swap
Shop colleague Chris Tandy to direct.
“The interesting thing about the show,” says Tandy, “and unusual for television, was the fact that if there was a locked door on set, it wasn’t just a case of saying, ‘It’s locked’ and rattling the handle. It had to be real. The only
limitation was the fourth wall – which was a red line on the studio floor for the cameras. Other than that, the contestants could go where they wanted. If they suddenly decided to head off into a different room, or return and find some props, we needed to find a way to cover it.”
Although the programme was whimsical in tone, Tandy recalls cast and crew were earnest in maintaining the fiction.
“When contestants arrived at the studio, either myself or Ian Oliver would spend about half-an-hour with them, giving them an idea about the kind of puzzles they might be coming across. But once they got on set, as far as they were concerned, they were doing it for real. It then becomes important that everyone they meet is in character.”
A new regular for this run was Ron Gad, played by Bill Homewood, formerly of the English Opera Company.
“Ian Oliver had been on a train with the actor Julian Glover, who was talking about me because we were working a lot together,” Homewood recalls. “And Ian said, ‘That’s Bill Homewood, I know him from BBC kids’ telly.’ To which Julian replied, ‘Did you know Bill can talk backwards?’”
Indeed, he could and still can: “I have to tell you, talking backwards comes easily to me, I’ve been doing it since I was four,” he tells SFX. The gum-chewing, Australian-sounding Ron Gad became one of the programme’s most memorable creations, with his own catchphrase: “Doogy rev!”
“We were improvising all the time,” he says. “If I was singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ backwards, that was entirely up to me. But we were discouraged from interacting more helpfully than required. We had to keep confusing the contestants. Charmian also held that brief, and had a nice, slightly remote, touch with the guests, which was ideal.”
As far as Homewood is concerned, during his time on the show (the entire third series, and the first episode of the fourth) there was only one contestant who had a handle on what he was up to. “That was the brilliant Richard Stilgoe.” The entertainer, whose party piece was creating instant anagrams, told Homewood after the recording, “I found some of the puzzles tricky, but I got you straight away.” As the actor reflects today, “It was a meeting of minds”.
Another two years passed before we returned to Arg, in which time the show parted company with Charmian Gradwell. “I don’t know why I wasn’t in the final run,” she says. “I don’t think I was even asked. Perhaps they wanted a change. I know that I’d turned down a very high profile job opportunity in order to stay loyal to The Adventure Game for the third series, which my agent thought was crazy – and it probably was. But then, I believed in it.”
In came Sarah Lam as Dorgan, while Chris Tandy took over as producer – but not before his predecessor had made a controversial decision. As they went into preproduction, he dictated that the Rangdo – the planet’s eccentric, chuntering ruler – should be switched from his most memorable embodiment as an aspidistra plant to an oversized teapot. “I don’t know why Ian Oliver did that,” chuckles Tandy. “I think a lot of these things just come down to a whim to be honest.”
Now working with director Oliver MacFarlane, Tandy set about rationalising The Adventure Game. “We wanted to make it clearer for the audience to be able to be one step ahead of the contestants. So, we spent more time trying to develop little scenarios that were played out before the explorers arrived, to explain what was going to happen. I’d particularly felt that while it’s fine to show players working on the puzzles in real time, unless you knew what they were aiming for, you’d lose a lot as a viewing experience.” Something Tandy is less clear about is why this series proved to be the last. “I think it was one of those things, unfortunately. It’s just the mind of the channel controller, isn’t it? They say yes to some things and no to others. Perhaps there wasn’t another slot available at that time… “I’m very proud of the show. Particularly the last run, because I felt we’d brought it of age. “I liked The Adventure Game because of its quirkiness. It was akin to I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, in a way – people who listen to that understand what Mornington Crescent is. Our audience had all these things about Arg. They ‘got it’; they were on the inside.” Bill Homewood is similarly positive, and despite enjoying a fine stage career, he’s happy to be associated with the show. So much so, when he popped up on Coronation Street in 1994, he had his character permanently chewing gum, a tip of the hat to Ron Gad. “Although, I wasn’t going to explain that to anyone on set!” As for Charmian Gradwell, who now lives and works in Australia, she tells SFX: “Over 30 years on I am still sometimes stopped and asked, ‘Are you The Adventure Game girl?’”
I’ve been talking backwards since I was four. It comes easily to me
The Adventure Game is released on DVD on 12 June.