The Ultimate Adventure

Chapter the 286th, it's December, so we're entering into Panto season...

Plot:
Sometime in the 1980s. The Doctor is travelling with a French aristo whom he saved from the guillotine, Jason, when he's called to Earth by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She wants his help to ensure the smooth running of an imminent peace conference in London. Security services have gathered intelligence that the American envoy is going to be kidnapped by extraterrestrial forces, but have foolishly let him go to a nightclub. The Doctor arrives just too late; Cybermen and mercenaries - who are working with the Daleks - have kidnapped the envoy after a shoot-out. The club's singer Crystal joins the Doctor and Jason as they try to track the envoy down. They travel to Altair 4, then the Bar Galactica where there are shambolic scuffles with baddies and the occasional song. A cute furry critter called Zog joins the TARDIS crew. They go to some other places, including revolutionary France where Jason nearly loses his head, and an asteroid field in space that they have to fly the TARDIS through death-defyingly. Eventually, they find the envoy, and manage to free him. The Doctor secretly records the Emperor Dalek talking of betraying the Cybermen and the mercenaries; they all turn on each other leading to another shambolic scuffle. The Doctor returns the envoy to the peace conference, but is concerned that it was too easy to escape the Daleks. He realises the envoy is under their control and is going to blow up the conference, but manages to decondition him and defuse the bomb. Crystal and Jason fall in love, and Crystal decides to join the TARDIS crew for further time and space travels.

Context:

Earlier in 2023, youtuber and Doctor Who fan Josh Snares put up a restored version of this play, which he had put together from the best bits of multiple video and audio sources. These were all fan made, as no professional recording was ever created either for commercial exploitation or posterity. When I saw that it was available, I thought that it would be something interesting to cover for the blog, but I waited until early December as it somehow felt a more fitting watch for the pre-Christmas period. I watched it on my own on the big screen TV through a youtube application rather than on a laptop screen, so I could get the best possible look at the story. I tried my hardest not to be influenced by any dips in audio and video quality and just rate the story as if I'd seen it live; Snares has anyway done an excellent job with what he had to work with - it's at this link, if you want to check it out.

Milestone watch: I started this blog in 2015 to cover all of the new and the classic series of Doctor Who in a randomly shuffled order, and I'm now closing in on the point where I catch up with the serial broadcasts of new episodes. I've so far completed 18 of the 39 seasons made to date, and have only one or two stories from each remaining season left. The occasional opportunity to blog something that falls outside the TV canon is usually embraced, as it puts off that point for a little longer. It's also great to be able to cover another Colin Baker story, even an only semi-official one; otherwise, I have only one of his left to go.

First Time Round:

The Ultimate Adventure toured UK theatres in spring and summer 1989 - first starring Jon Pertwee before Colin Baker took over later in the run - but I wasn't aware that it was happening. That period fell during my least engaged spell of fandom since becoming hooked on the series in 1981. My grandfather used to pay for the local newsagent to deliver a copy of Doctor Who Magazine every month, but when there was a cover price hike sometime in 1987 he stopped doing this. From that point, I disengaged a little, though I would still watch stories that went out on TV, and buy those few coming out on VHS. I didn't have much access to any information on the show during that time (those early videos were surprise discoveries rather than things I knew about in advance). I may have disengaged a little anyway even if my Gramps hadn't prompted it, as I was at that sort of age (15 years old). Three years later, in the spring of 1990, I flicked through the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine in a shop and realised that the copy had improved in terms of detail and depth. I started collecting it again, and then got a lot of the back issues I'd missed from a mail order place run by John Fitton (well remembered by Doctor Who fans of the time). It would have been when reading one of those that I found out about the play, much too late to go and see it. I heard bits and pieces here and there about it after that, but this youtube watch was my first time seeing it.

Reaction:

The strangest thing about The Ultimate Adventure is that it was written by Terrance Dicks, someone who knew every aspect of Doctor Who in detail and had a long and vast experience in writing the show. If I didn't know that, I'd be convinced the author was someone who'd vaguely heard about the programme but never seen an episode. Each aspect of the play is presented as textbook Doctor Who, but a textbook that has been hastily skim read. The Doctor has companions and flies around in a TARDIS, he visits weird planets and meets weird aliens with names like Zog, he travels back into history, he saves the world from Daleks and Cybermen. He doesn't usually do all of these in the one story, though. Even a big jamboree like Terrance's The Five Doctors had most of its action taking place in one place and one time, the better to contain all the other disparate elements. The Ultimate Adventure is attempting to do something more akin to the space opera with a cast of thousands of the last story covered for the blog - script-edited by Terrance, of course - Frontier in Space (although even that story didn't try to include a stopover in revolutionary France). The action of the play, lest we forget, had to be staged in a series of different regional theatres in the UK. It was ambitious to say the least, and seems baffling to me because Doctor Who comes with a ready-made style of story that would be relatively easy to put on as a touring production. It's the polar opposite of The Ultimate Adventure's approach, though. For example, another Terrance Dicks story Horror of Fang Rock would be a great template: a few characters in a spooky isolated location requiring only a few sets, with tension arising from character interactions, and simple effects.

Instead of such a chamber piece, The Ultimate Adventure goes for spectacle. This was clearly the brief from the money men and Terrance is writing to it, pro that he is. So, we have laser projections and smoke, actors on wires, swordfights and zap-gun battles on stage, and even a conjuring trick (Crystal at one point gets into a crate that is hoist above the stage, the crate is exterminated by Daleks and in a puff of smoke she disappears and emerges stage left. For one bizarre scene, our heroes play a game of Asteroids on stage on a big screen. There's also, infamously, songs. It isn't a full-on musical, there are only three numbers, none of which is particularly memorable but neither are they that bad. It's all part of the attempt to throw everything at the audience to keep them interested, but without ever engaging their emotions or even building up any intrigue. Each scene feels short, and most descend into stage fights that look a bit shambolic (at least from the angles that fans were recording the action). There's no sense that the plot is building in any way to a climax, as every five minutes the characters go back to the TARDIS and move on to another location (every other scene being a TARDIS scene is a big signal that something's wrong with a Doctor Who plot). I don't suppose any audience member over the age of four years old ever felt concern at any point that the Doctor and his friends were in danger, nor cared to wonder at any point how things would turn out. There is a cliffhanger in the middle of the play (the textbook says Doctor Who has cliffhangers), which I assume led to an intermission though the play isn't really long enough to warrant it. It's not the greatest cliffhanger: the Daleks are going to exterminate the Doctor, and the resolution is that the Daleks don't exterminate the Doctor.

Other inclusions leave one scratching one's head. There's a Vervoid (walking vegetable lifeform from The Trial of a Time Lord) in a song and dance number. There's a bit where the Doctor impersonates Winston Churchill. There's a long sequence where the character Delilah comes on strong to the Doctor. There's a cringe moment with a martial arts display on stage. I don't know what in time and space is happening on Altair 4 (it's like a fever dream, with kids in bat costumes doing flips on wires). Plus, warning: it contains scenes featuring Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was never not divisive, but was particularly so in 1989 towards the end of her tenure as UK Prime Minister. Dicks's line that he gives the Doctor "That woman terrifies me" is clever, in that it can be interpreted in a negative or positive light by the different sides, but I still don't like the Doctor saying it. There's a romance subplot between Crystal and Jason that is so perfunctory it makes Leela and Andred from The Invasion of Time (who get together at the end despite having barely looked at one another beforehand) look like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The production had wanted Kyle Minogue and Jason Donovan (who were explosively popular in 1989 - as mentioned before, The Ultimate Adventure is nothing if not ambitious) to play Crystal and Jason. Just by being themselves, and bringing the recent history of their onscreen relationship in TV soap Neighbours, they probably would have made it work. The play's overkill 'throw everything and see what sticks' approach mostly misses the mark, but if there's one positive that comes out of it, it's Colin Baker; he's consistently great. This was the first time he got to play the Doctor without being laden down with the aggressive persona that was written for him on television. It must have been worth the ticket price for fans at the time just to see him play the Doctor again.

 

Connectivity:

Both stories feature a plan by the Daleks than involves them allying themselves with other alien creatures, and both involve a lot of travelling from place to place.

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who: The Live Experience. I recently summarised a lot of the TV offerings to celebrate the 60th anniversary (see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Star Beast post for more details); there were obviously other things happening too away from the small screen, tie-in publications, extended universe media, and so on. What there weren't this time were any official in-person celebratory events. The only exception was a quite bijou concert in Cardiff earlier in the year that most people would have experienced on the radio or TV anyway; there was nothing like the three day celebration at the ExCel London attended by thousands of fans that took place a decade before for the 50th anniversary. This was a deliberate choice; current showrunner Russell T Davies mentioned in an interview that the production team were concentrating on things that everyone could access (plus, that production team was working on the 60th specials simultaneously with stories for 2024 and 2025, so likely didn't have time to be part of organising anything anyway). Nonetheless, Doctor Who has a rich history of such events, and they don't always have to be linked to anniversaries. Putting aside personal appearances and tours, which I think are a slightly different proposition (the year after the 50th anniversary, the stars and showrunner of Doctor Who did a global publicity tour, they were high on their own supply back then), there are two main types of live Who experience: theatrical shows and conventions.

There have been relatively few official Who stage plays over the years; before The Ultimate Adventure, there were short runs of a Dalek play The Curse of the Daleks in the 1960s, and another Dalek-featuring show Seven Keys to Doomsday in the 1970s, starring an alternate version of the Doctor played by Trevor Martin. There were a few unofficial offerings made by fans or even actors that appeared in TV Who over the years, but only those three official productions - one a decade - in the 20th century. There were lots of chances to sit in an auditorium and watch live official Doctor Who entertainment in the 21st century, but they were much more focussed on music; there were charity concerts, proms, and a touring "Symphonic Spectacular". All of these featured performances by actors in monster costumes, some also had brief filmed or live appearances by the current Doctor, but nothing else in the way of narrative. In 2010, there was an arena show "Doctor Who Live! The Monsters are Coming" which was still mainly about the music, but built an overarching story around the tunes. That was it, though; any full-on official 21st century stage play is still awaited. With conventions, the BBC rarely get involved in the organising, with lots of different events being run by fan groups, but official events few and far between. The 20th anniversary event in Longleat (Doctor Who's version of Woodstock), the aforementioned 50th event at the ExCel, and another similar one a couple of years later are all that come to mind.

In the same year as that first ExCel event, there was a series of anniversary screenings at the BFI Southbank of selected stories from half a century of Doctor Who. A few years later, a showcase of the animation of The Power of the Daleks restarted such events and they've continued ever since. For people lucky enough to be able to travel to London to attend them, they have provided an affordable way (tickets are very cheap for a few hours of entertainment compared to much else on offer in the UK capital) to get the best of both worlds. There's an opportunity to watch a story with an audience, usually a special edition version from a Blu-ray boxset or an animated version of a lost story, but there are also onstage interviews, panels, signings and the opportunity to see fan friends and acquaintances. They are also at least semi-official too, with BBC Studios providing the material to screen and other giveaways. The most recent of these events was for the newly animated version of The Underwater Menace, which I attended (a write up of that event can be found in the Deeper Thoughts section of a recent blog post for The Tenth Planet.) Alas, that was the final such event in 2023; there wasn't anything specifically connected to the anniversary happening at the BFI. These events tend to tie in to product releases, and - presumably because Doctor Who was on TV and all attention was required there - there wasn't any Blu-ray or animated product being released in November 2023.

Fiddy (L) and Thornton (R)

There was one small thing, though, a bit of an oddity that took place in early November. It wasn't one of the usual screenings, but instead formed a part of a season called Destination Time Travel programmed by Dick Fiddy, one of the usual hosts of Doctor Who events at the BFI. It was an illustrated discussion about the TARDIS, "The Most Famous Time Machine in the Universe". Slightly shorter than the usual screenings, its tickets cost half as much, so a couple of fan friends and I used it as an excuse to meet up one more time before the end of the year. The usual screenings are watching a Doctor Who story with an audience; this one was like watching a Doctor Who DVD extra with an audience. Fiddy kicked things off with a compilation of stills of the time machine put together by Doctor Who Magazine, accompanied by the new version of the theme tune as played at the 60th anniversary concert. In between interviews on stage, there was a series of clips compiled by DVD and Blu-ray Value Added Material producer Ed Stradling. These showcased various control room interiors from An Unearthly Child through to Spyfall. Before the first (classic era) half of this clip reel, designer Malcolm Thornton was interviewed. He created the TARDIS console seen from The Five Doctors onwards, and also the cloister rooms for Logopolis. Thornton talked about this, and about his other work for the BBC, including Star Cops.

Fiddy (L) and Ayres (R)

Mark Ayres was up next, this time in his role as Radiophonic Workshop archivist. Ayres had come armed with a laptop and a hard drive full of different sound files from the programme's history. These included the cloister bell sound, the source of which was the noise of an old immersion heater in the Workshop's Maida Vale studios being banged like a kettle drum. "Thumping the immersion heater sounds like a euphemism," added Fiddy. After the second (new series) half of the clip reel, the final guest on stage was Steve Nallon, voice artist and writer. He talked about his childhood being a fan of the Doctor. The inspiration for this entire season is a book that Nallon and Fiddy have written together, also called Destination Time Travel. Sweetly, it is priced £19.63, as a tribute to the year in which Doctor Who started (Fiddy managed to persuade Nallon that this was more appropriate than £19.85 as a Back to the Future reference). I got a signed copy in the BFI shop afterwards, but my membership discount rendered the pricing in-joke meaningless anyway. The book is a genre guide to time travel in film, TV and books, and is an interesting read. After Nallon, there was another brief clip of the late great Michael Pickwoad, new series production designer, talking about the creation of the TARDIS control room set and console that was used from The Snowmen through to Twice Upon a Time. After that, Ayres was invited briefly back on stage to play one more audio clip of a Doctor Who sound effect. With a wheezing, groaning sound, he "dematerialised us all to the bar". A slightly strange live experience, then, but - as can be seen with The Ultimate Adventure - Doctor Who has a long history of such things.

In Summary:

It seems silly to have a go at what is essentially a Panto, but this one really is Pants.