The Adventure Game - a Joy of my Childhood

The Adventure Game was always something that filled me with excitement when I was a kid. Along with Blake's 7, which I'm sure it used to share an evening with in the early 80s, it was something I'd wait to see with all the childish excitment my body could muster.

A feeling I never have any more, ever.

Some wonderful person has been putting episodes online! Here's a bit of the first one ever made, with the charming Juilan Bream and John Williams theme tune, and a somewhat familiar looking future newsreader on duty as a shape shifting dragon.

This is obviously the earliest incarnation of the show - the evaporating floor seen in this clip would be replaced with the more familiar "Vortex" challenge of later years. I remember in particular the "Drogna" - the currency the dragon residents, or Argonds, of Arg. Little plastic discs with a coloured shape on, their value was derived from multiplying the number of sides with the colours position in the "Richard of York Gave Battle" mnenomic - hence a red circle was worth 1, and a blue pentagon was worth 25.

I was so obessed with the Drogna it was a mainstay of my internal aspergic head stories for years.

I used to love the computer game sequence, where early on the team's alpha male would sit at the keyboard of an Apple 2 to play a little text only adventure, where the command "SUBTRACT ADDER" sticks in my memory for some reason. Later on came the BBC model B, and the game Dogran Hole, where a little grumpy space dog would go into a hole in the wall, to be guided by the bloke, again, in a 3D Monster Maze type game. Thus the team would be distracted from failing to work out Lesley Judd was the evil mole, as happened every week.

I was thrilled as anything when Paul Darrow, the immortal Avon from Blake's 7, showed up one week, although his beard was offputting and he met a dismal evaporation fate for failing to remember a "PENTAGON-RED" tile sequence or some similar slip up.

I miss this show. Of course, The Crystal Maze was similar in conception, right down to the idea you progressed by winning crystals, but its charm was negated by the fact the contestants were a bunch of dimwitted yuppie cretins in boiler suits, as opposed to clever people like Heinz Wolff and Johnny Ball. Nowaadays, we have Dale Wintin camping it up at dimwits on lottery garbage output.

The joy of childhood can never be returned. Seeking it drives you mad, but watch these clips and be reminded of it for a little while...

As a final treat, here's David "The Chinese Detective" Yip taking on the Vortex in a later series.

The Mad Death and Urban Foxes

The fact that baby eating Urban Foxes are in the news at the moment immediately made me think of the 1981 BBC TV Rabies drama "The Mad Death" - see clip above - where foxes were involved in spreading an outbreak of Rabies throughout the British Isles.

Never mind babies having their fingers bitten, this TV show showed in gory glory the real chaos foxes can cause. This poor infected Alsation in the clip, foaming mouth spreading diseased saliva in front of the faces of terrified children and shoppers, was just one victim.

Any of the humans that got infected started frothing at the mouth like they'd been eating Remegel filled with Ariel Automatic, but this was the least terrifying part of the deal. Violent hallucinations followed, involving the insane faces of foxes, naked women with golden foxes eyes for navels, and worst of all, the constant sense that you were drowning, even in your own saliva. Hydrophobia. Ugh and double ugh.

To a ten year old boy, the whole thing was pant shittingly scary. Every trip abroad from then on involved nervous scouting for any sign of mangy looking dogs or cats. Not even that, any animal was potential death on four legs; an inquisitive German Shephard in a french town called Josselin scared me so badly I vowed to my parents I'd never visit there again.

And so far I haven't.

So remember this TV show when you next read about babies being attacked by foxes. Cute Mr Fox isn't just walking infanticide; he's a chicken killing bio warfare weapon of foamy mouthed mass destruction to which the only solution is a vulpine final one...and no doubt the chaps in red jackets on horseback will be calling for just that.