The Crystal Knightmare.

I watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show last night. It's a bonkers film; but not un-enjoyable. I was prepared to hate it because of The Time Warp, but they got that out the way pretty quickly. Anyway, I digress. As Richard O'Brian was in it I started thinking about one of the greatest television programs of all time. The Crystal Maze.

The Crystal Maze, if for some bizarre reason you haven't seen or can't remember it, was a program where a group of six people had to complete various puzzles. Each puzzle was set in its own little room and had a strict time limit. If you succeeded in your challenge you would get a crystal which would give you five seconds in the crystal dome. If you failed then you came out empty-handed. If you were still in the room when your time ran out you got locked in the room.

And there were four zones. Each zone had different puzzle rooms in that zone's theme. There was the Aztec zone (a lot of sand), the medieval zone (a lot of stone), the Futuristic zone (a lot of radio controlled vehicles) and a zone that had something to do with a ship (you've guessed it; lots of water). Clearly all the budget went on the sets, because I remember the prizes as awful. If you had won enough time in the crystal dome to get enough of the gold tickets to win the 'grand prize' then good old Richard O'Brian would announce that they had won an afternoon's pony trekking or something.

Another program that I liked was a program called Knightmare. In this program a ten/eleven year old child (a boy usually, not a lot of girls on Knightmare) had to put this big helmet on which obscured his eyes and his friends had to guide him through all these different dungeons telling him what to do so he didn't get killed.

In reality the kid with the helmet on was in a big room with a lot of green screens and it was all computer generated. But what I really liked about this program was that if they steered their friend wrong and he 'died' that was it. Go home you losers, you failed. I only remember about two groups ever completing the quest. It would often take weeks for a team to work through the story and they explained this away by saying that the dungeon was in a weird time zone or something and that the dungeon only worked for twenty-minutes at a time. Now, that's good writing!

I haven't sold either of these programs well, so judge for yourself.





And this is how not to play Knightmare.