Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 28 (The Adventure Game)

The easiest way to describe The Adventure Game is that it’s what everybody who foolishly wants the Celestial Toymaker to come back should watch instead. It is, in effect, that story done right and as an ongoing series. In each episode a trio of celebrities from the B-list or below (possibly far below – I’m not actually sure everybody who appears on the show is actually a celebrity) are stuck on a fictitious alien planet and left to escape by playing odd real-life board games and solving puzzles. And, you know. Talking to angry plants that they have to address with the proper terms of respect or risk evaporation. Like you do.
What is most important to The Adventure Game is not its almost completely incoherent worldbuilding but its sense of tone. All of the elements are familiar in the abstract as parts of a Captain Kangaroo-esque children’s television. But instead of being presented straightforwardly as a world that the viewing children are invited to understand The Adventure Game presents its world as a puzzle to be continually figured out.
A prime example is Rongad, a character in the third and fourth series of the show, who speaks backwards. That is, he reverses the letter order of every word he says as well as his sentence structure. In a normal piece of children’s television, this would be presented as, essentially, an in joke for savvy viewers. His appearances would serve to reintroduce the central concept, and the pleasure would be in the ability of the audience to make sense of the apparent randomness.
But The Adventure Game doesn’t give them the chance. Even if you know the trick to Rongad it’s impossible to make sense of what he’s saying simply because auditory parsing of backwards English at conversational speeds is not actually possible. So instead we get a world in which there are rules, but even knowing the rules is not entirely useful. The show is not a comforting piece about learning by repetition but one about playing within a set of rules.
This, of course, corresponds with what the show is actually about. The actual content of the show is based on watching the guest stars try to figure out puzzles and maneuver their way through Arg. So, for instance, in the episode of most interest to Doctor Who fans, the one where Janet Fielding plays, there’s a puzzle based around floating an egg up from the bottom of a glass to acquire a piece of string tied around it, and the fact that the egg will float in salt water.…