I would have been just over eight-and-a-half years old when I first saw an advert for The Crystal Maze, and being well into gameshows I begged my Mum to be allowed to stay up and watch it. It. Was. Incredible – unlike anything I’d seen on television before (except possibly The Adventure Game and Treasures of the Mind Lord, which I was probably a bit young to appreciate) and the next six years involved having friends round and inventing our own games using whatever we had to hand.
Even now, there’s a sizable amount of us who will bellow “GET THE CRYSTAL!” when someone is failing at a simple task, like opening some blinds.
It’s the show’s 25th birthday tomorrow and it still holds up really well – Challenge are devoting an entire day to it to celebrate. There’s been a lot of talk recently that with the new popularity of exit games that this is a show that ought to be bought back, yet I think this will inevitably lead to massive disappointment, ending up as a referendum on whether you like Russell Brand or not.
Still, let’s remember the show as it should be remembered, someone failing to hook a cage on a stick whilst standing on a revolving log above a tank of water:
Quick interesting fact: we all know the story that The Crystal Maze is based on the ideas of (Le Cles de) Fort Boyard because the fort hadn’t been fully converted when C4 wanted to make a pilot, it actually beat it to air by six months, Fort Boyard‘s 25th birthday is on the 7th July. Fort Boyard is still going and still highly watchable, but it’s not been at its best for a while I think it’s fair to say.
Richard O’ Brien is 72.
French news.
Saturday Night Takeaway’s local adaptation quite bombed this Wenesday on M6 – 2.1m viewers , 9% share. They made the choice to concentrate on the audiance pranks/ I’m A Celebrity Get me Out of Ear (so no Ant v Dec, no Win The Ads or outside games), fluctuant production quality but it was sill fun to watch . Too bad 🙁
Remember Cash Letters ? (that game Greg Scott piloted some months ago) It’s getting a full test run here, taking Motus’s slot all week long starting today (first ep. is available on Pluzz) then every Saturday. Quite liked it, fun to playalong but the production made the choice to not have any audience (most likely due to being rushed), making some empty feels from time to time.
This is where we had a little chat about Cash Letters originally:
https://www.bothersbar.co.uk/?p=8153&cpage=1#comment-290692
Will look up on Pluzz later thanks.
I think we’re all quietly quite glad The Crystal Maze has never got it’s much wanted reboot as it would struggle to live up to the original run.
I was in exactly the same boat as you, Brig. I think I saw it in the TV listings and I begged my parents if I could stay up and watch it since it was on at 8pm which was my bedtime at the time and they did, and from then, I was hooked. Hard to believe that 25 years have passed since it first graced our screens and it’s still as popular now as it was back then.
I always remember the episode where at the end there was a short message that one of the contestants had died after filming in a motorbike accident or something similar and saying to my grandma ‘maybe he died because the Aztec zone was too warm for him’!
Always a tricky decision – you look sympathetic if you don’t do that but mawkish if you do. Because the show attracted young, go-getting urban professionals who liked to do risky activity sports, it happened quite a bit. I believe they lost 3 contestants in one series.
On a happier note, I owe my career to TCM and will have happy memories of it. Sadly, doing a uni degree at the time meant that I never got to see the set.
David, did you design some of the games? If so, I always wondered how the process of doing that went. I still have a load of sketches in a folder in my bedroom of various games I devised (albeit some were targeted at a Crystal Maze 3D platformer).
I actually owe a lot of my current passion for video games and game shows to The Crystal Maze, it was basically all I watched as a child. Thank you for that 🙂
I remember that too. Instead of playing the theme music on the outro, there was just silence when they displayed the message, then it went to the credits and played the theme.
This very episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCUpepVsXaw
And if you want some random stats from The Crystal Maze, I have you covered.
http://danielpeake.com/blog1/2015/02/15/the-crystal-maze-turns-25-today/
Here’s another random stat: There’s only one game out of 277 with an even number of wins, losses, and lock-ins.