Blast from the past; The Crystal Maze

One of the great joys of my youth was being ill as it allowed me to stay at home and watch Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network all day.

However, there is only so much Doug or Arthur you can watch without feeling a bit sick at all the bright colours, dodgy animation and the bizarre looking characters. And so, channel hopping would begin which would eventually lead to the glorious then and but slightly less glorious now Challenge TV.

I can’t pinpoint the first time I watched The Crystal Maze but it was probably before the turn of the century and I was, to an extent, terrified of it. A creepy fortune telling woman, people getting locked in small rooms for either failing some pretty basic challenges or failing at games tantamount to torture and Richard O’Brien all probably contributed to this.

But minor peril never really hurt anyone and thus, The Crystal Maze became my entertainment of choice when I was ill and off school right up until the very moment the Playstation 2 arrived in my life.

For anyone that doesn’t know, all five of you, The Crystal Maze was a loose copy of French show Fort Boyard in which contestants with very bad hair and in primary colour jumpsuits undertook a series of challenges in four different themed ‘worlds’ to win crystals. The challenges the contestants faced fell into four classifications; physical, mental, skill or mystery with sexism dictating male contestants often took the physical games and inevitably failing at them.

The number of crystals that the contestants won contributed to how long they would have in giant crystal filled with pieces of gold and silver paper; the show’s finale. If they grabbed enough of these pieces of paper in the allocated time, they won a prize ‘of a lifetime’ which was non-transferable for cash, I think. Not that it mattered of course, more humans have been on the moon than won The Crystal Maze.

At its peak, the show received up to 6 million viewers on Channel 4 and was the channel’s most popular programme, achieving cult status particularly among the student demographic, unsurprisingly.

Despite the innovative games, for my money, the two real joys of the show were the set and original host Richard O’Brien.

The maze was purpose-built in an aircraft hangar in Essex for £250,000 and the attention to detail and the quality of the production values were stunning, even to my youthful eyes. The dank squalor of the “Ocean” world contrasted so much with the open, bright “Aztec” world as to make them look like different planets, not a mere couple of feet apart. The haunting dungeon of the “Medieval” world was where the money was best spent with numerous genuine-looking props, eerie lighting and a constant supply of dry ice simultaneously produced a homely yet chilling effect.

It’s a wonder why the set piece for the finale looked so budget; a biosphere looking structure filled with fans at the bottom and lots of pieces of foil that, according to Wikipedia, took a lot of experimentation to perfect.

As I was saying before I went off on an inevitable tangent, O’Brien was the other main attraction. The writer of The Rocky Horror Show (yes really) was cast as a host and a bizarre host he was too. He was like a cool version of Dr Evil but more mad. His ‘character’ sounded as if he had been stranded in the maze for as long as he could remember (he had made the ‘Medieval’ world into his home where he lived with his ‘Mumsie’) and despite being a guide to the contestants, he wouldn’t hold back from putting them down witheringly. His seemingly random monologues to the camera and eccentric dress sense only added to the depth of his endearingly odd character. Oh, and every now and then he would start playing his harmonica. For no apparent reason other than he just could.

O’Brien left the show in 1993 and despite his successor, Edward Tudor-Jones (a cross between Dylan Moran and a rejected Doctor Who costume) adding his own brand of oddness to the show, he was no O’Brien as was reflected in the gradual diminishing in audience figures The Maze garnered, resulting in the show’s cancellation in 1995 after six series on Channel 4.

Its legacy can be seen anytime you put on terrestrial TV on a Saturday night with shows such as The Cube, Ant and Dec’s Push the Button and Total Wipeout to name but three all tracing their lineage back to The Crystal Maze’s combination of physical and mental challenges and host’s who either encourage or take the piss out of the contestants (sometimes both). One just needs to see the opening to the first ever episode to see elements of all the shows outlined above in evidence.

Clearly, its legacy is a lot less impressive than it should be but as is the way with trailblazers; the knock-offs will never be as original nor as compelling nor as innovative as they are just that, knock offs.

For one last thought, ITV were rumoured to be planning a remake of the show at the beginning of last year. For reasons no one can ever possibly explain, the host was to be Amanda Holden. The plans were shelved. The world breathed the biggest sigh of relief since VE Day.