The Adventure Game

A Fistful of Drogna

The Adventure Game
UK 1980-1986
Simply Media DVD Region 2

I don’t know who Simply Media are but they have my undying gratitude for bringing out on DVD one of the greatest television programmes ever to come out of the UK. The Adventure Game was a kind of game show, with a marked difference to any other kind of competitive show at the time, which ran from 1980 to, roughly 1985/86 ish. It ran for 22 episodes spread out over four series and it’s a big dose of my childhood viewing that I didn’t think I’d ever get back or, indeed, have a chance to watch again. Well... mostly back anyway... two episodes, one from each of the first two series of five episodes each, are missing presumed wiped. Of the remaining 20 episodes, at least two (again from the first two series) are only included in this volume because they existed as ‘off air’ recordings from private collectors on either VHS or Betamax video tape. The quality of those specific episodes does indeed show at times but I am, again, absolutely grateful that Simply Media have managed to track down what they could because, without those off air recordings, we would not have been able to see now how such celebrity guests such as Paul Darrow, Madeline Smith and David Yip got on in their adventures on the fictional planet of Arg.

The show was set on said planet and inhabited by Dragons who could take human form. The plot of the game show each week was that three time or space travellers (depending on which series you are watching, things were pretty fluid on the show) would crash land on the planet Arg and the likeable Argons, who were cursed with ‘an unfortunate sense of humour’ would put them through a series of locked room style puzzles (pretty much the first of their kind on British TV) in order for them to leave the planet with the crystals to power them on their way.

Now I used to love The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy when it debuted as a radio show back in 1978 and I had no idea that Patrick Dowling, who devised The Adventure Game out of his interest in the game Dungeons And Dragons, wanted to capture some of the spirit of Douglas Adams masterpiece in his show and, indeed, even asked Adams to contribute writing to the show (although Adams was busy at the time with a TV adaptation of his masterwork so had to decline). There is, though, in hindsight, some of the flavour of that universe in this weekly show but, honestly, The Adventure Game was a phenomenon unto itself and, in my opinion, laid the groundwork for other similarly styled shows from later years like Fort Boyard and its UK version The Crystal Maze... although, frankly, those shows couldn’t hold a candle to The Adventure Game.

Every week you’d have three players arriving, comprising of two celebrities plus somebody else who was an expert in their field. Nowadays, of course, the less recognisable experts from the day can sometimes turn out to be modern celebrities too, as I discovered when I realised one of the contestants on one of the shows was Chris Hughes, who is now a regular expert on the TV show Eggheads. When they arrived they would be greeted by the Argons, who would aid and abet them in their puzzle quests and these people were huge personalities to us viewers. There was the sometimes half-deaf butler Gandor, played by Chris Leaver, who was absolutely brilliant and, as far as I can tell, the only regular who was in every series and every episode. I often wonder what has happened to him because I can’t find out anymore information about him and I don’t understand why he was never used by the BBC after this show... at least that I can see.

Other regulars would be the absolute sweetheart Charmian Gradwell as Gnoard, who was in all the episodes of the first three series and who disappeared completely by the fourth. Which is a shame but I assume she’s doing fairly well as the last credit I can find for her is as Cate Blanchett’s dialect coach on Marvel’s Thor: Ragnarok. She was replaced by Sarah Lam as Dorgan in series four and... she did an okay job but we all missed Charmain when she was gone. If you haven’t figured it out yet, all the names and a lot of other things on Arg were anagrams (or partial anagrams in shorter words) of Dragon. Newsreader Moira Stuart played Darong in series one and she was kind of okay in the role. Also, one of the contestants in one of the shows in the first series was Lesley Judd... who got evaporated and became a series regular as a ‘prisoner of Arg’ in the second series. Basically, the contestants would have to rescue her as part of their tasks in series two, not knowing she was now an Argonian mole who was there to help stop them from winning the game. The contestants were asked at one point to figure out who the mole was and point to their nominee saying ‘Mole, mole, go to your hole.’ However, if they got the wrong one, their nominee would be evaporated in her place... which is what happened in the majority of episodes.

Two other series regulars also captured the imagination of the people who used to watch this thing.

One was his royal highness the Randgo of Arg. Up until the end of the third series he would take the form of a grumpy Aspidistra and the contestants would have to bow and say Gronda Gronda Randgo to appease his grumpiness. In the third series he was more mobile and spurted water when he was very angry, controlled by everyone’s favourite R2 unit controller Kenny Baker. In the fourth series he took the form of a huge teapot that would spurt steam if unhappy with people.

And then, of course, there was Rongad, played as a gum chewing, Australian Argon by Bill Homewood. He really caught the nation’s attention by being able to talk backwards and hold lengthy conversations in backwards speak, much to the consternation of the groups who would visit each week. He would come on singing a backwards version of Waltzing Matilda and even if the contestants finally managed to twig he was saying everything backwards and that he couldn’t understand them unless they were talking backwards... “Nodrap?” he used to say... they usually weren’t quick enough to translate more than a few words to try and help them solve some of their puzzles. Everybody I knew who used to watch it used to copy Rongad’s “Doogy rev!” exclamations to indicate something was “Very good” and I believe the actor in question still uses this exclamation on Twitter to this day.

The puzzles were brilliant too and, although they followed a fairly close pattern for each series, were somewhat different every week. One of the things which struck me as I watched this now, was how lost a modern set of celebrity contestants would be nowadays. How many of them would figure out how to construct an electromagnet or add salt to water to get things to rise in a tube? This is a real timepiece of a show and it’s as much fun watching celebrities of yesteryear such as Noel Edmonds, Keith Chegwin, Janet Fielding and Johnny Bull trying to figure out some of the devious puzzles devised by the Argons (or the show’s creators, I guess) as it always was. I was expecially impressed with the late Professor Heinz Wolff (he used to appear on the BBC show The Great Egg Race) who managed to pretty much work out almost every puzzle fairly quickly. I think he even managed to survive to the end of the show which was, actually, a fairly rare occurrence.

These DVDs brought it all back to me and, although I guess the show probably shows its age to younger viewers, I have to say I felt like I hadn’t aged a day when I started rewatching these. I even somehow remembered David Yip was going to type his name into the computer wrong and be called Daviod for the rest of the episode. And who can forget the brilliant Drogna game, where all the contestants had to do was work out the not so subtle Richard Of York Gave Battle clue (“In vein, I believe sir!” Gandor would prompt them) to get the combination of shapes and letters that made up the Argon currency, Drogna, that would get them safely across the floor tiles. Or the absolutely brilliant ‘Vortex’ board where the majority of the contestants would meet a sticky end at the conclusion of the show (unless they were intelligent enough to throw a green cheese role onto a nexus point to see if the ‘invisible to human eyes’ vortex was there). And don’t get me started on the Dogran and his Dogran Hole!

The Adventure Game was a show like no other and I have to say I spent most of my Christmas holiday this year reliving this, to much enjoyment. If you’ve never seen this before, slip on a copy, reset your screen ratio to 4:3 and let the absurd surrealist humour coupled with various celebrities and experts in their field generally showing how clueless they are in the face of Argon humour wash over you. If you remember this show from back in the day and you loved it then... pay it another visit. It hasn’t changed a bit.

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

Cool Han, Luke

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
1977 plus subsequent ruinations USA 
Directed by George Lucas
20th Century Fox BluRay Region A/B 

So this film was pretty much my life for 6 and a bit years.

When I first saw it, back at the very end of 1977 when it was released in the UK, I was two weeks shy of my tenth birthday. It was just called Star Wars back then. Lucas had no real thoughts of it making enough money to do a sequel and it wasn’t until the 1978 thetrical re-release that he retroactively redid the opening to reflect the Episode IV: A New Hope title (many people say it was later but I remember going to see it again in 1978 with that title). I went and saw the original version at the Dominion cinema in London (now a theatre which shows musicals) and the crowd scrabbling for entry beneath the massive, giant, illuminated signage poster artwork was a leviathan of chaos.

The Dominion cinema was pretty much one of the bigger cinemas, the likes of which you just don’t get in London today. It was an ideal venue for a film which pretty much blew away most people who went and saw it. It was the biggest cinematic event I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how much the hype and the pre-marketing of this film, after it had already premiered in the US, dwarfed pretty much any modern blockbuster to this day. The only thing which came near it was when I had to queue around the block for a midnight screening (at least a day after the release) of Tim Burton’s Batman back in 1989... but as big as that was in terms of media saturation, the original 1977 Star Wars was like a bomb going off in everyone’s collective consciousness. I don’t remember it playing for less than three months at my local cinema and this was in the days when cinemas had one screen only, remember.

The film is simplistic in theme and content while still retaining a gritty, lived in look for the setting. The effects were so groundbreaking that Lucas even had to set up Industrial Light and Magic part of the way into production and invent new ways of doing things, just to cope with the demands of what was required. It payed off big time... people had never seen anything as slick as this in the space opera genre on the big screen (or small, come to that) before. An homage to those old theatrical serials that Lucas loved as a kid (who doesn’t love those serials?), Star Wars was shopped around through a lot of studios before 20th Century Fox agreed to pick it up. This was after Lucas had already tried to acquire the screen rights to his beloved Flash Gordon, of course. Once he was refused, he made his own homage to Flash Gordon with his own characters... who later became Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia Organa, Obi Wan Kenobi etc... after a fair few rewrites.

The way it affected me personally was to engulf almost the whole of my life at the time.

I read the Marvel Comics, listened to the double vinyl LP record on almost constant replay, collected and swapped the two sets of blue and red bubble gum cards that came out in the UK (not knowing that the Americans had three other sets released after these until over a decade later), played with the action figures when they, eventually, hit the shelves and kept two or three ring binders full of my own sketches, notes and articles based on the first two Star Wars films. It was all I, and many of my friends, ate, breathed and slept apart from when we were eating, breathing and sleeping the various bandwagon spin off movies that followed hot on the heels of Lucas’ magnum opus (Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, Star Trek The Motion Picture etc.). It was a phenomenon which I don’t expect to see repeated in my lifetime.

On BluRay we have to live with the “revised through various versions to buggery” editions. So, I think it would be fair to say, the film has never looked as bad as it does now but, even with the annoying additions and alterations, you can still see a lot of the sheer genius and panache coming through which marked this film as the real deal back in the day. It’s a shame that it’s been so tinkered with on subsequent editions, where backdrops now come alive with moving CGI creatures and ships which kinda fill the screen more... but somehow leave you with less of an experience.

There are, of course, some big problems with the prequels to this film not tying up too well. I mentioned in my review of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith (which you can read here) that there’s no way Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru wouldn’t recognise C3PO, who is effectively the mechanical son of Darth Vader, when they saw him because he’d been living with them for a long period of time not even two decades before. Similarly the ageing process of both Obi Wan Kenobi and Grand Moff Tarkin, not to mention the significant amount of time it takes to construct the first Death Star in relation to the time it takes to knock up the second one for Return Of The Jedi, really doesn’t hold water when you inspect it all closely.

Now this is further nitpicking, I’m sure (nitpicking is the path to strong continuity decisions my friends) but in the scene where Obi Wan Kenobi is blatantly lying to Luke about his father... certain point of view my ass, lying is lying... he also compounds his lie with the completely unnecessary fib that his father wanted him to have his lightsabre when Luke was old enough to have it. Well excuse me but Vader assumes his one child (he doesn't know they are 'twins' in Revenge Of The Sith) died with his wife... presumably until he learns different somewhere in between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Also, although Lucas was smart enough to add a shot of Obi Wan retrieving Anakin's lightsabre, post duel, this could hardly be, by any stretch of the imagination, representative of the specific sentiment that Obi Wan expresses to Luke in this specific scene.

Another thing Obi Wan says, and you may want to attribute (aka stupidly retroactively attempt to justify) this to the effects of old age, is that he has 't gone by the name of Obi Wan since before Luke was born. Nope mate. Completely wrong. Just saw it in the last movie... you were still going by the name Obi Wan until shortly after Luke was born. So this really is not good attention to detail and both this and the previous problem of Anakin's lightsabre are both examples of many foolish mis-steps which the prequel trilogy has created where none existed before.

The film was, of course, not without it's problems when it first came out as a stand alone experience. Many of these, such as the stormtrooper who bumps his head on a door, are remembered affectionately by fans of the series but I, lunkheaded viewer that I am, only now noticed one particular one on this last viewing (even though I've probably seen the film close to 50 times since 1977). The particular case in point is when Luke and Han steal the stormtroopers' uniforms. One of the more spectacular things found in this first Star Wars movie was that "laser guns" had real, visible consequences. They were just like regular, bullet firing guns... only prettier. They ricocheted, they left scorch holes in their wake and the guns had a recoil to them. It was details like this that set Star Wars apart from many of its predecessors and, sadly, many of its successors. Why then, I ask you, after you hear the laser blasts as Luke and Han incapacitate two stormtroopers to steal their uniforms, are their costumes all squeaky clean and free from blast holes? This enquiring mind wants to know.

Asides from all the little niggling negatives, though, the original Star Wars still holds up as a really decent movie. The device that Lucas attributes as a steal from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, that of telling an extraordinary story from the viewpoint of the two lowliest characters (in this case the droids R2D2 and C3PO) works very well in dragging you right into the story straight away and engages you in a way that other films with a different starting point are not always able to do.  The plotting is simplistic but ferociously paced and doesn't let up until the end credits.  much like those old 1930s and 1940s serials that George Lucas was trying to emulate. Heck, even the opening title pyramid crawl was a particular gimmick used in a lot of the serials specific to the Universal studio... and in this particular instance it might be worth pointing out that this style of recap was used in the third of the Flash Gordon serials... Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe.

There's one last thing I want to properly mention before bringing this little review to a close because I think it's important in that this was another way in which the film has had, still to this day, a lasting impact on the way many films are made... and it was all down to John Williams', frankly, outstanding score.

Before this film, the age old way of scoring a Hollywood film with a lush, orchestral score the likes of which the Steiners, Korngolds and Newmans of this world used to provide, had gone way out of style somewhere around the late 1950s/early 1960s. Directors wanted more jazzy, funkier and transparent soundscapes for their films. The music had to be hip. It had to be cool and, mostly, it had to have a hit title song if at all possible. Now Johnny Williams (soon to be listed with the shortened, more respectable form of his first name) had already bucked that trend a little a couple of years before this movie... when he provided an absolutely brilliant score for Steven Spielberg's first film Jaws. For this film, rather than take the space aged, modernistic, computerised tones most associated with sci-fi pictures, Lucas wanted a proper, full Golden Aged Hollywood, wall to wall score for his movie and this is exactly what Williams gave him... he gave him "the full Korngold", so to speak. When the record sales for the film were in, not to mention John Williams winning his third Oscar for this score, the studios realised that, not only could romantic, classical music still work as a viable option for a film score... It was also still incredibly popular. Popular enough to get some serious cash back from the record sales. And that's why many film scores to this day still use this Golden Age approach to the scoring... because Johnny Williams proved it could still work wonders in support of a movie.

So that's all I have to say, in this particular kind of venue, about the first Star Wars movie. Still a good film and although it has many added revisions, on the Blu Ray version Lucas has at least softened the much criticised ( and rightly so) Greedo shoots first revision. On the Blu Ray the two gun shots happen faster, pretty much simultaneously, and you can kind of justify to yourself that Greedo’s blaster just went off as a muscle spasm reaction to Han's killing shot. It was kind of impossible for either of them to miss at that close range anyway.

So, yes, a marred film now but still a classic. I still have the “untampered with” versions of the original trilogy on a special DVD release from around 6 or 7 years ago and I won't be parting with those versions anytime soon.  An elegant movie from a more civilised time... not as clumsy or random as a director's cut. The greatest Star Wars movie, however, was just three years away...


Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker