April 17, 2025

The Ultimate Adventure

“Business is business. We always aim to please.”

As the 1980s came to a close theatre impresario Mark Furness was enjoying success with his stage version of BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo! which had recently transferred to London’s West End after a national tour. Retaining almost all of the television series’ then cast, it was an enormous hit, and Furness began looking around for other properties on which he could collaborate with BBC Enterprises, the corporation’s then commercial and licensing arm.

In June 1988 ‘Allo ‘Allo! briefly shared BBC Elstree with Doctor Who when the production of The Greatest Show In The Galaxy was shifted there from BBC Television Centre following the discovery of dangerous levels of asbestos in the building. While this event wasn’t what prompted Furness to contact the Doctor Who office with a view to optioning and producing a stage version of their series as well, it did allow Sylvester McCoy the opportunity to hang out with ‘Allo ‘Allo!’s Gavin Richards, with whom he’d been a member of The Ken Campbell Roadshow a decade or so earlier. (Such are the deep bonds forged between actors who have shoved ferrets down each others’ trousers.)

Originally the Doctor Who office wanted McCoy to star in any Furness produced Who play, him being the “current Doctor”, and the first script pitched for the proposed stage spectacular was by the show’s then script editor Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch, author of the Remembrance of the Daleks. However, Furness decided to go in a different direction entirely, seemingly without letting Cartmel and Aaronovitch know. Besides, the spring-into-summer tour dates for the play would have overlapped almost exactly with the recording of the 1989 series of Doctor Who. Something else was needed.

Furness asked former Doctor Jon Pertwee to appear in a play he had commissioned from writer Terrance Dicks. Dicks had been the series’ script editor from 1969 to 1974, a period encompassing, but not limited to, all of Pertwee’s television stories. He’d also written Doctor Who And The Daleks In Seven Keys To Doomsday, an earlier attempt at a Doctor Who stage show which had played in the West End at Christmas 1974. He had form. He was the only person alive who did.

Dicks’ second Doctor Who play, dubbed The Ultimate Adventure, was announced in Doctor Who Magazine #147. Rehearsals began on 27th February 1989 following a press launch at the London Palladium on the 23rd. (Clearly enjoying himself Pertwee told the press he had left Doctor Who when “I was so badly hurt I turned into Tom Baker! A fate worse than death!” The show opened a month later, on 23rd March, at the Wimbledon Theatre, a place with which Furness had a relationship, and where ‘Allo Allo! had also started out.

In the absence of any of Pertwee’s television companions, the play saw his Doctor accompanied by Jason (Graeme Smith) a fugitive from the reign of terror¹ and modern nightclub singer Crystal (Rebecca Thornhill). Jason’s name, Smith’s nationality (he is Australian) and Crystal’s profession did not dissuade fans from believing rumours - rumours the promoters doubtless encouraged - that Furness had initially hoped to cast then pop sensations Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue in the roles. Ms Minogue would sadly have to wait nearly another twenty years for her turn as a Doctor Who companion. Poor Mr Donovan is still waiting.

Crystal being a singer also facilitated the inclusion in the show of three songs (at least one of which was diegetic) while Jason’s background provided a convenient way to include a guillotine based stage illusion, both elements that were on the producer’s ticklist of things to include (also on said list, amongst other things, a space bar inspired by Star Wars’ cantina and a Kirby wires flying sequence). The Doctor, Jason and Crystal found themselves facing Daleks, Cybermen (appearing together for the first time!) and a group of intergalactic mercenaries, led by a sort of bondage space pirate called Karl.

Karl was played by actor David Banks, who had appeared as the Cyberleader in four 1980s television stories. Banks was also asked to understudy the lead. He agreed on the proviso that he was allowed to, in effect, create his own Doctor Who, with his own costume and attitude. He didn’t want to go on, if he went on, in a grey wig and Jon Pertwee’s cape. Not that he expected to go on. As Pertwee had also explained at the press launch, he was 71 but went swimming every day and his idea of relaxing afternoon was a spot of water skiing.

The show was praised in the Daily Express during its opening week, with the paper noting that he had always been “the most resourceful Doctor Who of all and he returns to the role for a witty and fast moving stage show”. Curiously, letters in Doctor Who Magazine were less complimentary than the national press, with one reader writing to say “every time the band struck up I found myself wishing I’d stayed at home and washed my socks instead”. Others were not keen on the play’s inclusion of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a comic character, or the way Pertwee’s Doctor called her “Dear Lady” and kissed her hand. 

A month into the tour, on 29th April, during the afternoon matinee at Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre, Jon Pertwee emerged from the TARDIS during the Doctor’s first scene of the play, and after missing a cue, turned to the audience and apologised. He did not feel well, he said, and would not be able to continue with the show. The curtain fell and, with a nearly full house, it was decided that, of course, the show would go on. And so would Banks. At the final curtain he received a standing ovation.

I was, sadly, not in the audience. I could have been, but I had been given the choice of seeing the show either in Birmingham or later in the run in Northampton with my friend Scott, and chose the latter. I found out in later years that pretty much every other Doctor Who fan I came to know in Midlands fandom was, though - as, randomly, was then Midlands-based Davros actor Terry Molloy, who had taken his children to the matinee show.

Everyone agrees the atmosphere was, after brief disappointment at Pertwee’s absence, extraordinary. Recalling going on at a convention this century Banks commented that it was a “special” night, and that he was pleased he had committed to creating his own Doctor, rather than going on as a variation of Pertwee’s.

Banks had selected a white suit, a brightly coloured, sleeve-less Greenpeace T-shirt and a brown felt hat for ‘his’ Doctor, arguing “...if I was going to play the part.. I’ll need my own costume… every Doctor has a distinguishing feature. So that’s why the Greenpeace t-shirt came into it. And I don’t think I can claim that that’s why I didn’t wear socks but anyway, it was that kind of free-wheeling, understanding that the earth, that the Doctor came back to so much and loved so much, was in danger and would have to be warned about.“² (One can’t help but wonder if the socks Banks didn’t wear were the ones the disgruntled DWM reader should have stayed in to wash. Or is that just me?)

Sadly, while  multiple secretly recorded fan video copies of both Jon Pertwee and Colin Baker’s versions of The Ultimate Adventure have circulated in Doctor Who fandom since 1989, no one seems to have had a naughty camera set up for either of David Banks’ performances that Saturday, although there were always rumours that someone had. If you have one, do write in.

At the beginning of June, Pertwee bowed out of the show. This was unrelated to his having to skip a performance, and had always been the plan. Doctor Who Magazine reported that Pertwee was to star in an Australian tour of the show, which would begin towards the end of the year and needed time off before then. Colin Baker, who had worked with Mark Furness on the play Death Trap, took over the show from 5th June. 

Asked about the process of transforming a Third Doctor story into a Sixth Doctor Colin noted to DWM that “… if there’s ever been any doubt that the Doctor is central to Doctor Who rather than the individual character of the actor playing the part, then that’s been dispelled by the fact we only had to change about one line in a hundred.”³

Colin’s dates included the show on 22nd June at the Theatre Royal Northampton and I was delighted I’d chosen that show in advance. Eleven year old me had three or four Jon Pertwee stories on VHS, plus The Five Doctors, whereas I’d not seen so much as a second of Colin’s Doctor since his last television episode three years before. You couldn’t buy any of his stories, and I’d not been able to record any when they were on.

Three years is an astonishingly long time when you’re that age. I loved the show, and Colin and David Banks signed my Attack of the Cybermen Target Book. (I still have it. And a second, later copy of the reprint edition for reading. I’m not a savage.) While I didn’t know the difference at the time, in retrospect I wonder if those who objected to Margaret Thatcher’s inclusion in the play might be perhaps mollified by Baker’s Doctor’s dismissive attitude toward her; his incarnation called her “Maggie” and made a show of not listening when she talked to him. 

Baker later told DWM he’d considered adding a line to the effect of “I suppose you’re going to whinge about Europe now, eh Maggie?” but decided it was “too political”. (Both Doctors, when out of the then Prime Minister’s earshot confess “I can deal with most things in the universe from Daleks to dinosaurs, but that woman terrifies me.”)

On stage Colin wore a bespoke variation on his Doctor’s coat, one that incorporated purple and blue sections and a frilly cuffed shirt. It’s arguably the most successful version of that Doctor’s costume. It remains less well known than it should, due to the publicity photographs for the tour being taken before it had been made, necessitating Colin wearing his TV costume for them (albeit with a unique waistcoat/tie combination).⁴

The stage costume did eventually have a renewed moment in the sun as an action figure variant, although Jon Pertwee’s stage-only green jacket and grey cape version of his 1970s costume never did. Hey, how about a double pack? I’ll buy it. Again. Throw in a David Banks Doctor to make it a triple pack and we’ll really be talking. Someone get Character Options and B&M on the phone? Ta.

The Ultimate Adventure came to an end on 19th August 1989 in Eastbourne with the last performance of the Colin Baker version of the play. (That planned Australian tour never materialised, like the West End transfer Furness had hoped for). Doctor Who’s final twentieth century season would start little more than two weeks later. The show, which Terrance Dicks referred to in the potted biography included in his later novels as “a modest touring success” is an oddity in a period where we now assume Doctor Who must have been in decline. 

The Ultimate Adventure has a simple ‘kidnap and peace conference’ plot, largely expressed as a travelogue / whistle stop tour of historical periods and alien planets. It isn’t really in tune with the earnest and angry Doctor Who of 1988/89⁵ despite Dicks’ own record in office of politically and socially engaged Who⁶ and Banks’ T-shirt. There is, though, a fairly earnest engagement with, if not nuclear disarmament, then nuclear weapons reduction (of the kind that enjoyed cross party support in the late 1980s) and there are arguably traces of Dicks’ professed “mild left” politics in the way the Daleks’ mercenary army chorus “Business is Business” before getting up to no good, emphasising their devotion to the profit motive. (There are also a couple of barbs from the Doctor at humans failure to tackle climate change effectively. Plus ça change.)

Does it have any sort of legacy? At one point Terrance Dicks was due to immortalise the story in print as part of the Target Books range, but rights issues prevented this happening, at least according to Target’s last editor Peter Darvill-Evans. Who would know. For modern fans there’s an enjoyable Big Finish version of the play, complete with songs, available on CD and featuring both Colin Baker’s Doctor and Noel Sullivan from Hear’Say as “Not Jason Donovan”.

It’s for its Doctors that The Ultimate Adventure has real consequences. Colin Baker said in the early 1990s that the play had felt like an encore, and that it helped him draw a line under the role of the Doctor, a part which he loved playing, but had departed from on television in far from ideal circumstances. This, at least, allowed him to exit the part again and with, quite literally, audience applause ringing in his ears. You’d have to be dreadful churl not to be pleased for him.

Yet it turned out to be the first of many returns to the part for him. Might he have taken to Big Finish productions so early and with such enthusiasm without this reprise of his Doctor? Or might he, like Christopher Eccleston decades later, nursed his wounds a little longer?

Jon Pertwee too was beginning a new period of re-association with the show by appearing in The Ultimate Adventure, but I’ve gone on about it this before. So I’ll just direct you to a previous iteration of this idea going around my head and then into a keyboard, here.

Banks reprised the role of Karl, but not the Doctor, for Big Finish’s later audio adaptation of the play, which feels a little like a missed opportunity. I’ve always thought that a recording of the Banks version could easily accompany and complement the Baker version. So here’s an opportunity: Banks is a writer as well as an actor. BBC Books are actively looking for more new old Target Books. Howabout a Target Book, written by Banks and starring his Doctor? He’d do the audio book too, of course. It would be fun.

And that’s the word for The Ultimate Adventure. It’s fun. A largely successful attempt to transfer Doctor Who to the stage in the era when it seemed every high school in the country was sending kids on trips to the see Starlight Express as an end of term jolly.

Me? I just remember sitting on the climbing frame at the bottom of Scott’s garden, having been allowed to stay up later than at any point in my life prior, and wanting to see the show again.

I still do. Want to see it again, I mean. Perhaps one of the twenty-first century Doctors could be persuaded to star in a revival? In the era of Stranger Things and The Hunger Games on stage, I’m almost convinced it makes sense.

Bring back David Tennant, right? That always works.