READY PLAYER ONE...

In The One Game, the ruthless head of a games company had the tables turned on him by an eccentric genius from his past. Robert Fairclough remembers this cult ITV show from 1988…

British science fiction television was an interesting mixed bag in the 1980s. The BBC’s hardy perennials Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 were still going, although both would be gone (temporarily, in the former’s case) by the decade’s end. There were also adaptations of classic sci-fi literature – The Day of the Triffids (1981), The Invisible Man (1984), the Chocky trilogy (1984-87) – and forays into situation comedy like Kinvig (1981) and Red Dwarf (1988 -).

At the same time, UK fantasy TV went through a brief phase of tapping into the legends of King Arthur, a sub-genre pioneered in comics like Camelot 3000 (1982-85), a futuristic take on the Knights of the Round Table. The children’s serial Knights of God (1987), about a future Britain ruled by a fascist religious order, fielded a resistance leader named Arthur, who was the father of the Knights’ leader, Mordrin (alluding to King Arthur, his son Sir Mordred and the conflict between them). With comics enthusiast Andrew Cartmel occupying the script editor’s post on Doctor Who in 1987, by 1989 it wasn’t too much of a surprise to see the Doctor revealed as Arthur’s wizard Merlin, as the Time Lord skirmished with Arthurian knights – including Mordred – from another dimension in the story ‘Battlefield’.

In 1988, between Knights of God and ‘Battlefield’, arguably the most intriguing, and original, example of Brit sci-fi TV’s dalliance with the King Arthur legend emerged in the Central ITV network’s The One Game, a four-part serial written by former teacher John Brown, from an idea by Tony Benet. (It was only Brown’s second script for television; he’d previously written the thirteen-episode crime drama The Brief for the TVS network in 1984).

Made at the end of the “greed is good” decade, Brown wove the Arthurian archetypes into the story of how a talented, charismatic games designer, Magnus (Patrick Malahide in black leather and black beard, unrecognisable from his most famous role, Minder’s fussy DS Chisholm, from 1979 to 1988), is betrayed by his ruthless business partner, Nicholas Crane (Stephen Dillon, née Dillane, a young actor in his first leading TV role).

Brown explained: “I had in mind that Nick was King Arthur and Magnus was Merlin the Magician. On this level, the action of The One Game shows what would happen if Arthur said to Merlin, after he’d helped set up the Kingdom, ‘Get lost. I don’t need you any more.’ In The One Game, Nick gets rid of Magnus once [their] games company is established.”

The Arthurian theme continued through the other characters, with Nick’s ex-wife Jenny (Phillipa Haywood) named Jenny after King Arthur’s wife Guinevere, Nick’s enigmatic lover, Fay (Kate McKenzie) for Morgan Le Fay, Arthur’s magical saviour and protector, while Jenny’s boyfriend, Gavin (John Boe), was named after Sir Gawain, Arthur’s nephew and one of the Knights of the Round Table. The third element that made the series both distinctive and of its time was that – as the title specifies – Magnus and Nick’s conflict was played out as a complex game.