The Ben Chatham Adventures

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Er, who?!
—Doctor Who Magazine

The Ben Chatham Adventures are an ongoing series of Doctor Who fanfics by Sparacus, a poster on Gallifrey Base. They star Ben Chatham ("played" by Adam Rickett), a heroic, self-depreciating, multi-layered character self-insert of the author. The plots are occasionally affectionate homages to 1970s Doctor Who stories, such as the 1974 stories The Green Death and Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

He was introduced in what Sparacus maintained was a Canon Series 2, which featured Rose falling for Chatham, the Doctor killing a hamster, Mickey joining a cult and Jackie Tyler dying from a brain tumor contracted from a genetically-modified apple. (But that's okay, because Sparacus maintains that she was too low-class to appear on Doctor Who anyway.)

Eventually, Chatham left (because "Rose was a chav") and became the focus of his own adventures, in which he fought aliens (or more accurately, stood around, did nothing and then called Torchwood to deal with everything) alongside a wildly unlikable supporting cast, which have long since overshadowed his time with the Doctor and made the link to the Whoniverse more and more tenuous. He would return to Who in an alternate version of Series 4, in which he and a mute Donna Noble traveled through time and space (but mainly through rural England) as they faced the combined evil forces of the Meddling Monk, BOSS, the Cybermen, and some random Von Daniken aliens. Ben then left the TARDIS again, falling in love with someone he just met who offered him tickets to see Bowie. As is traditional with Ben, he was immediately dumped and left alone in his own spin-off series.

Another poster by the name of Lemon Bloody Cola started unrelentingly praising Sparacus as an intellectual genius, and the fics themselves as daring and inventive pieces of art. He soon became a secondary writer for the series, with fics packed full of Purple Prose, complex-yet-genius plotlines, Alien-walrus rape, X-Men tributes, and Isobel. LBC built up a persona of an angsty, right-wing intellectual who wrote bad poetry and whose girlfriend had apparently run off with a Marxist hippie. Many believed he was taking the mickey, and later he revealed that he was.

As the fics gained notoriety, a series of Ben Chatham stories written (mostly) by Sparacus's detractors was launched, giving Chatham the possibly unique honor among Mary Sues of having spawned his own fan fiction. The "fan" series is widely regarded as universally superior to the "canon" output (though it is unknown whether Sparacus has read any of it).

New "disciples" of Sparacus include Mutie (actually a regenerated Lemon Bloody Cola) and JonPertweeFan (who became famous on the forum for typing nonsense and even trying his luck on this very wiki). These two are the most vocal fans of the series. Sparacus continues to claim that a so-called "silent majority" exists that supports his stories, but evidence of this is slim. You know, because they're silent. And let's face it, if this is true, then any silent majority which sincerely and unironically liked these stories would have very good reason to remain as such.

Villains have included such innovative monsters as Russians (all of them called Ivan) and Kylie Minogue. Later stories have included such enemies as the androids in Chateau of Death, and Evil Snowmen from a Short Annual Story.

Stories are written as if they were pitches for television stories; however, they frequent include content that would never make it on the main show, such as overt sex, mints that act like drugs, and the gory murder of Cornish fishermen by monsters created by Russian stereotypes. Orchids and teenage girls with their throats ripped out also feature with regularity.

The series is notable for being incredibly badly written (or So Bad It's Good and an incredibly devoted Stealth Parody that's gone on too long), with a very jarring present tense voice that makes even the few decent ideas difficult to follow, and for the author's constant insistence that:

  • No matter how many people hate his stories, everyone else on the forum loves them and form a "silent majority"
  • That all criticism is void; he counters it with "Unsubstantiated Assertion!"
  • That Chatham is canon

You can read archives of the recent material here, and a summary of Ben's adventures here. Stories up there include:

...and many more for those crazy enough to dig through the archives.

Characters are detailed on the character sheet.

Tropes used in The Ben Chatham Adventures include:
  • All Just a Dream - every Halloween special, in which Katie becomes a vampire and kills Ben, or when a vampire with a maggot-ridden skull kills Ben, or when Ben is killed by the Nimon.
  • Anticlimax Boss - in Chateau of Death, the main villain, alien Napoleon Bonaparte, dies from getting caught in the crossfire while the heroes are fighting his androids.
  • You Fail Physics Forever - in Planet Waves, the heroes are trapped in a room filling with gas, and decide the best thing to do is get down on the ground "as gas floats so it is safer at ground level". Yeah...
  • As You Know: The most common form of exposition.
    • "You insolent dog! You were chosen as one of the illuminated few who my race allowed to remember the Reapers last visit to your world in 1987, in order to prepare for their second coming."
  • Author Appeal: Sparacus seems to fancy Adam Rickett...
    • LBC Mutie has a similar thing for Hannah Murray.
  • Beige Prose: All events except for those which feature Ben topless are described with astonishing economy, to the point where alien invasions are introduced and solved in the space of a sentence.
  • British Accents: Kyle's accent seems to vary wildly between mancunian, scouser, cockney...basically anywhere that sounds vaguely working class.
  • Chickification- Rose, Martha, and Donna have all fallen victim to this.
  • Crossover - two in a row, with The Ghosts of Weatherfield as a Coronation Street crossover and The Lord of Reedy River being a Robin Hood crossover. The cast were so massively out of character it was difficult to work out whether it was a crossover to the 1978 or 2005 Tv series...
    • Unfinished tale: The Case of the Twelve Gold Crosses, with Sherlock Holmes. And it has Oscar Wilde as Chatham's love interest...
  • Deus Ex Machina - in Operation Delta, Sarah Jane Smith and K-9 enter the story just in time to save Ben from being killed.
    • in Doppelganger, the alien monster turns out to be allergic to Ben's aftershave and explodes.
    • in Death in the Cloisters, the alien killer turns out to be allergic to jelly babies and explodes.
  • Drowning My Sorrows - Ben does this to an insane degree.
  • Everyone Looks Sexier If French - "CHATEAU OF DEATH" seems to be heading in this direction.
  • Evil Foreigner: "New Morning", which also features good French stereotypes to balance the scales.
  • Fan Nickname - Spartha Jones, and occasionally Ben Shatham.
    • Sparacus himself has gained a few, such as 'King Weirdo' or 'The Fishy One'.
  • Fanon - Of a sort; despite the vast, vast, vast quantity of evidence to the contrary, the author insists that his fanfiction is part of the series continuity.
  • Five-Man Band
    • The "Hero" - Ben
    • The Lancer - Katie
    • The Big Guy - Kyle
    • The Smart Guy - Shakey Jake. Apparently. The Doctor takes on this role when he appears.
    • The Chick - Isobel, or the Doctor's companion when she appears.
    • And of course, Torchwood's old Five-Man Band, given how Chatham frequently texted or called them to solve his problems. The parody fic "Useless" lampshaded this with the narrator asking him "So you're contacting a super-top-secret alien-fighting organization through... Regular text messaging?"
  • Harmless Villain - The Apocalypse Chaser is a massively powerful trans-dimensional being whose plan involves causing a paradox to tear space-time apart to create an army of Reapers... who eat him.
  • Heroic Sacrifice - Ben, strangely enough, in the movie pitch New Dawn. But then he has an Unexplained Recovery.
  • How Do I Used Tense - Almost all of the stories are written in a present tense voice not in about 99.8% of any other written medium outside of scripts.
  • Identical Grandson - both Friar Tuck in The Lord of Reedy River and Barry Tuck are apparently played by ... sigh... Johnny Vegas.
  • Licensed Sexist - probably most of the cast due to Writer on Board, but in particular Ben himself and Barry Tuck, the waiter of a wine bar the main cast frequent who is able to produce canned laughter from thin air by savagely groping members of the main cast.
  • Loads and Loads of Characters - there are a surprisingly large number of recurring original characters for a fan series. Kyle, Craig, Isobel, Katie, Paul Farraday, Corrine Shaw, Barry Tuck, Shakey Jake, Anselm Ashford-Ashworth, Carl and Abby Simpson and probably some more. None of them do much, though...
  • Long-Lost Relative - in Chateau of Death, Ben finds out he has a half-brother he never knew about, the product of his father's affair with a French actress.
  • The Mafiya: Run a chemical scheme in "New Morning". And they're all named Ivan.
  • Missing Fic: Some of the stories were only hosted on the sadly lost Outpost Gallifrey Doctor Who forum, but many still exist on the writer's blog. Sparacus claims there is a missing fic that explains in detail how the BC adventures can possibly fit into canonical Doctor Who and why no one ever mentions Ben.
  • Moral Dissonance - A lot of Ben's actions are overtly selfish, repellant, narcissistic and just plain wrong, and he at times possesses an almost sociopathic lack of compassion or interest in the affairs of others, yet he's rarely ever called on it. The writer also often refuses to acknowledge any of this.
  • MST - Most people are fans of Ben Chatham because they either read or write what amounts to MS Ties of the orignial fics
  • Oscar Wilde was Chatham's love interest in The Case of the Twelve Gold Crosses.
  • The Other Darrin - Sparacus managed the rare feat of achieving this trope in fan fiction, by replacing his initial choice for Katie Ryan, former Eastenders actress Martine McCutcheon, with pop star Kate Ryan.
  • Plagiarism - Despite the typically hostile reaction to the overall story, Sparacus did earn some rare praise for the ending of the Robin Hood crossover, in which Chatham actually risked his life to save the day. At least until someone pointed out he had ripped the ending off from another user's parody rewrite of the Chatham New Year Special story, in which Torchwood's Gwen Cooper had risked her life in virtually identical circumstances to save the day. The parody story ended with the Torchwood team violently assaulting Ben when he tried to claim credit for their actions; so far it's unknown whether the parody's author did anything similar to Sparacus.
    • For that matter, most of the stories are nakedly transparent ripoffs of classic Doctor Who stories with the focus skewed to make them entirely about Ben.
  • Planet of Steves - All of the Russians are named Ivan.
    • And all of the women in the latest story, set in France, are named Giselle.
  • Oxbridge
  • Double Standard Rape (Male on Male): Particularly when the victim is Ben, the offender is Henry VIII, and he forces Ben to put on a dress in preparation. He's interrupted before he can carry out the deed, however.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin - Apparently Ben has a "smoothe" chest. And the less said about punctuation the better.
  • Secret Test - in the election special New Dawn, Ben and his team investigate a political party apparently led by the Eleventh Doctor. At first, it looks like the Doctor is actually a Zygon who has kidnapped the real Doctor - but it turns out the whole thing is a test of Ben's team by the Doctor and Amy, who presumably had nothing better to do.
  • Self-Insert Fic - one story ends with Katie molesting one of the story's critics in a coffee bar.
    • Ben Chatham himself is a blatant insert. Sparacus' personality and opinions grafted inside the body of Adam Rickett.
  • Stealth Parody (hopefully)
    • LBC, now Mutie, is an admitted one.
  • Suddenly Sexuality - Ben can apparently turn any man homosexual in 6.72 seconds.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial - "I have never stolen young girls knickers off washing lines and sniffed them."
    • Sparacus is always coming up with these, often as a rebuttal to previous criticisms which greatly (and disturbingly) expand on what the original criticism was about to hint at a more lurid and disturbing nature.
  • Too Dumb to Live - All core cast members have had at least one moment of blinding stupidity. Ben and Craig have had several.
  • Word Salad Title - a chapter of the LBC story "The Claws of Time" was named "Columnated Ruins Domino". Case closed.
    • ...wait a minute, that's a line from Smile!
  • Working Class People Are Morons - Ben (and, not incidentally, Sparacus himself) is very fond of sneering at 'chavs', even if the characters being sneered at don't actually fall into that particular group. A lot of them (unintentionally?) turn out to be a lot more useful and intelligent than he is.
  • Writer on Board: Ben's views seem to dovetail remarkably well with Sparacus' own opinions on a wide variety of subjects. Particularly the working class -- or rather, anyone who may have an accent commonly associated with and vaguely appear to be working class.
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