The Chase

John Peel The Chase (1989)
Here's another Target I bought for the sake of completism, sad fucker that I am, and fairly recently too. I hadn't read one in years and noticed that I had all but about fifteen of the things, so I hit eBay on the grounds that most of them were still affordable and it would give me a massive hard on to see them lined up in order on a shelf.

Something like that anyway, and it's nice to have the option of re-reading them given that I no longer have the patience to watch it on telly. It even feels a bit weird watching the old ones which I once loved, although that's more to do with me and television in general than me and Who. At the risk of repeating myself, Who was once very special to me, and if I squint a bit - at least enough so as to occlude everything since about 2005, particularly the fans - I can still sense a bit of the magic.

When I was a kid, it felt like something which got made almost in spite of the company responsible, something which bordered on horror - as it did in the early seventies - and a fairly extreme existential horror to anyone under the age of ten. The 1973 Radio Times special was mind blowing because it hadn't occurred to me that there might have been Who before I'd started watching, or that there had been monsters I'd never heard of.

Anyway, I think The Chase may have been the first Hartnell I watched on VHS, simply because I'd taken to renting a VCR and I happened to see it in a sale. It probably wasn't a great place to start, but I thought it was wonderful regardless; and if I still frequented such places, virtual or otherwise, which rated Who stories in order of artistic merit, I'm sure I'd still be getting massively defensive over this particular dog's dinner. For those who spent their youth engaged in healthier pursuits, The Chase was apparently plotted by giving action figures to a couple of three-year olds, setting them out in the garden, then seeing what they came up with. So they start off in the sandpit, which all goes pear-shaped when someone gets their bollocks out; leading to brief experiments by the pond, or pretending the garden shed is haunted; ultimately ending up in the flower bed with a load of ping pong balls brought into play because of reasons. This at least saved Terry Nation the embarrassment of recycling the usual plot, I suppose.

All the same, The Chase bulges with beautifully stupid ideas, even if they're strung together in a rhythm which suggests everyone's treading water until Peter Butterworth can get time off from whatever Carry On they were shooting back in June 1965. Nation's script did more than we saw on the screen, and Peel's adaptation makes use of this, filling in details for which neither time nor budget allowed first time around; and it's hardly Stephen Baxter, but considering the extended Crackerjack sketch which Peel attempts to pummel into something vaguely less ridiculous, it's not half bad either.

The first part, as you may be aware, occurs on the planet Aridius, inadvertently presenting a harsh lesson in nominative determinism; but where the screen version was cut to the essentials of amusingly theatrical aliens and the notorious ballbag octopus, here we get something that could almost have been Richard Shaver thanks to just the slightest expansion of this first third of the story. After Aridius, it's mostly business as we probably expect, and not even Peel can make Morton C. Dill either funny or interesting but, you know, we're already off on a good foot, and I kept on reading, and nothing insulted my intelligence like some of the recent stuff, and mostly it reminded me of why I had once been so endlessly fascinated by Who.

See! Sometimes I do have something nice to say about it.