Weaver's Week 2009-06-28

Race hosted the radio programme Jazz In Perspective, which quickly gathered a reputation thanks to the host's forthright opinions. He regularly guested on the lightly topical discussion show Any Questions?, presented Home in the Afternoon and its successor PM Reports, and was the musical mistakes man for Many a Slip, the spot-the-error game show hosted by Roy Plomley.

It's as the host of My Music that Steve Race will be best remembered. From 1967 to 1994, he was the driving force behind the panel game; not only did he presented it, but he also researched the show, and selected the guests. In writing the questions, Race took to sleeping and driving with a notepad within easy reach, so he could scribble down questions that might give informative or funny answers.

Steve Race was also a writer, with a column for The Listener, seven books, and a regular engagement compiling a crossword for the Daily Telegraph. He was made a Freeman of the City of London in 1982, and appointed OBE in 1992. He died last Tuesday.

Dowling had joined the BBC in 1955, and worked on the 1957 television version of The Railway Children. By 1959 he was directing programmes for the Children's Department. The Cabin in the Clearing was the story of a resourceful family under threat in the Ohio wilderness. McGown and Doherty's "The Hill and Beyond" records how the programme had been made just five years before, and the script had been recycled for this new version. It featured Patrick Troughton in a supporting role.

The BFI catalogue shows that a few other of Dowling's early works have survived – he presented Adventure Playground (1963), in which some waste ground in Grimsby was converted into an adventure playground. He directed Fascinating Facts (1963), hosted by Donal Donnelly; and Working With a Computer (1965), in which various everyday tasks are put onto computers.

The replacement was Vision On (1964-76), a programme that operated exclusively in the world of the visual, and that would be produced throughout by Patrick Dowling. Pat Keysall and Tony Hart were the most familiar faces on the show, subsequently joined by madcap inventor Wilf Lunn, and mime acts Ben Benison and Sylveste McCoy (as he then was). Vision On was a programme that quite deliberately set out to entertain all children; the lack of speech meant that deaf and hearing-impaired youngsters weren't excluded, but nor were they singled out for special treatment.

Vision On really hit its stride in 1969, under the direction of Alan Russell, the future Record Breakers director. A typical episode would see Pat and Ben transform themselves into a fantasy land, perhaps being chased out by a tiger that Tony's hands drew through stop-motion photography. Then we'd have The Gallery, in which viewers' paintings and drawings were shown. "We can't return your paintings, but there's a prize for those we do show," was the traditional conclusion. Susanne would ride on her tortoise, Humphrey, and amongst the many animations dotted throughout the show, there would be something from Cosgrave Hall, something from Peter Sproxton and David Lord.

Vision On was phenomenally successful, and recognised by the industry. It won the Harlequin Award for children's programmes in 1970, the international Prix Jeunesse in 1972, and the overall BAFTA for Best Specialised Series in 1973, beating out such makeweights as Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. The series came to an end in 1976, when Dowling sensed he was beginning to run out of ideas.

It could almost be said that Vision On split into two. Though Pat Keynsall left regular television work, Tony Hart had been very famous before, and would go on to host Take Hart, produced by Dowling. The show would go on to win the Harlequin Factual award in 1977. Lord and Sproxton continued to make animations for Take Hart, and the spin-off series The Amazing Adventures of Morph won the Harlequin for Drama and Light Entertainment in 1980, and a BAFTA in 1984. The non-art energy – Wilf Lunn, the mimes – went under the aegis of Doig, and eventually emerged as Jigsaw. A knowing jigsaw piece guided an Alice-in-Wonderland (Janet Ellis) through surreal sketches and comedy routines, in the framework of hinting at letters to form a word.

But we digress again. In 1974, Will Crowther had written a computer program. Crowther was an experienced caver, and took the map of some caves he was exploring, and converted it into a guided tour for less experienced speleologists. Don Woods had taken the map and underlying idea, added in a fantasy quest in the style of Dungeons and Dragons (invented 1973), and distributed it on the ARPANET. The program, by now called "Advent", came to the attention of Patrick Dowling, who initially contacted Douglas Adams to see if he could turn that idea into a television format. Adams was unable to help – neither man was quite sure what Dowling's idea would become when translated to television, and anyway Adams had contracted to write a second radio series of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which he would work on continuously before, during, and even after its January 1980 transmission.

Instead, Dowling worked with Ian Oliver on what would become The Adventure Game. Games shop owner Eamonn Bloomfield talked them through the concept of Dungeons and Dragons, and Monica Sims, by now the Head of Children's Programmes, gave Patrick the keys to the cupboard and trusted him to deliver quality programmes.

Structurally, The Adventure Game followed the basic plot laid out by the computer game Advent and its many derivatives. There was a prologue, an initial test that would help the explorers to make sense of the world around them, and introduce them to some element that would recur during the show. The traditional middle game was collecting treasure and moving it somewhere else: on television, it became a question of opening a locked door through a simple task of trial and error. Advent concluded with a "Master Game", with such elements as secret canyons, wizards' houses, trolls on bridges, volcanos, silver bars, magic rings, and lamps with limited battery power. For the television show, these became a challenge to get through another locked door, or win a crystal, using the laws of physics, often by using elements of history, sometimes some code-cracking, and oodles of lateral thinking.

What set The Adventure Game apart from every other interactive fiction game made up to this date was that it was written with wit and humour. The computer games packed as much game as they could into the limited space available. Anything that didn't advance the plot was rooted out as a waste of space: the austere Advent's one nod to humour was calling a cave "Witt's End".

The Adventure Game both needed and was able to go further than the traditional three stage game, adding an all-or-nothing denouement suitable for television. From the second series, Dowling came up with The Vortex, loosely based on Hnefatafl, the favourite board game of the Vikings ten centuries earlier. Even if children didn't fully understand the puzzles in the master game, they would enjoy the guesswork of the finale, and rejoice when Noel Edmonds got deaded by the Rangdo. The Adventure Game won the Harlequin Award for Drama and Light Entertainment for its second series in 1981.

The Adventure Game would go on to inspire the authors of computer games, and begat the interactive fictions of Knightmare and What's Your Story?, and latterly programmes like Time Busters. Even Raven owes something to the Argonds: they demonstrated that viewers will accept their representatives intruding into a recognisable fantasy world. A games exhibition in Birmingham earlier this month featured a Living Dungeon challenge, which cited all of these shows (and The Crystal Maze) as inspirations.

Patrick Dowling remained active into his eighties, giving interviews to researchers and helping his colleagues to keep memories accurate. Dowling died on 17 June 2009.

In researching this obituary, we have drawn heavily on an interview Dowling gave to Off The Telly in 2004; the It's Prof Again website for its history of Vision On; and the Inform Fiction history of interactive fiction. All errors of fact and interpretation are our own.