Toujours Plus Fort (effectively Fort Boyard’s Bit On The Side) gave us GOLD this evening with about a minute of the Richard O Brien Fort Boyard pilot they filmed in London. We’ve previously seen about two seconds of it as part of a contestant call out for the original French show so this is both fascinating and wonderful. Also: the look is very Industrial zone.
I don’t know if this will go directly to the bit, but it’s just after 30:30 on the clock here:
As soon as this is placed on frace.tv website I will be translating the whole section so we can see what they were saying about us and our adaptation. Now wouldn’t it be funny if France were about to acquire our Crystal Maze format? After all they own it now.
You can just see Richard’s talent, and to be fair the format, shine through here. Didn’t realise on first view that was filmed in London – looks a bit temporary but makes sense considering the origins of The Crystal Maze being the Fort wasn’t ready. I was thinking it was something the French production team had thrown together when the Brits rang up and said they were coming over to film a pilot in a couple of days.
I always thought from the two seconds we’ve seen he did the pilot in France… never realised there was a TV studio prototype in London!
Liam replied in the comments asking if they’ll post the whole pilot – that would be amazing to watch. Please France 2 make it happen!
I wonder if it’s less ‘the look is very industrial zone’ and more ‘industrial zone looks like this’; it strikes me as possible that they liked the cobbled-together look here and that inspired the Industrial Zone aesthetic.
Holy cow the holy grail does exist! Surely they’ll upload it in full at some point this season to mark the anniversary?
It looks like they just built that one side of the ‘fort’ and cleverly moved things around so it looked complete. I’m guessing the cells were on the opposite side to the Fort set. It’s surprising how different TCM to Fort Boyard considering that pilot. At the very least you’d have expected some of the games to remain the same and elements like the music beds to have stayed. I guess that little treasure room door was the inspiration for the little door on the dome. I guess the moat around the dome was because you couldn’t have water around the maze so you had to have it in the centre.
It’s also surprising they got the tigers in for the pilot.
Yes, it was designed as a 1/4 size replica IIRC.
So this is the one done for ‘some nice sandwiches’? Seems an interesting halfway house between the two shows.
At least we know how Richard O’Brien would perform in a house fire now.
I wonder if the French ever did a run through like this?
It would seem odd to do all the work on the Fort if they didn’t really know if the format would work.
So much to enjoy here.
The bastard offspring of the TV-am clock, embryonic work in progress of two different shows, and Richard O’brien.
I’ll take a flyer that the ‘London Studio’ probably was a stage at Shepperton Studios, where series one of TCM was recorded.