In Which I Set the Scene for Tomorrow

For those of you who don't yet think I'm a sad mentalist, let me point you to what happened to me the other day. I was around D's, and I was beating him at Pro Evo 8 again, despite me being Deaf, Dumb and Blind XI and him being the Every Superhero Who Has Been In The Justice League Ever, which was doubly unfair as instead of the regulation 11 players, he had 84 (plus another five for substitutions, natch). Anyway, I still managed to fight the good fight until D suggested that "We never ever play that fucking shit game again." I suggested that we watch a film, but he said "I don't have the mental capacity to pay attention to something over an hour." I suggested that he pick an episode of a series for us to watch. "I don't have the mental capacity to pick a series." So I suggested we watch an old Crystal Maze episode. For those of you who don't know what the Crystal Maze is, up yours, because it involves a longwinded explanation, which follows here. In fact, I'm going to have to furnish you with the rest of this article tomorrow because thinking about it, the concept is somewhat complex. Below is a simplified and shortened explanation.

The Crystal Maze is a- what the buggery would you call it? A defunct game show, but game show doesn't do it justice.  For a start, four out of the six serieseses are presented by Riff-Raff from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, who is delightfully mad, and the others are presented by a man who is less delightfully mad and so has faded into obscurity.

Each episode there is one team comprising of three males and females. They are plonked into a labyrinthine setting in which there are four zones- the Industrial, Aztec, Futuristic and Medieval with Oceanic replacing Industrial in later serieseses. These sets were pretty nice, by the way, they all interlinked in an area the size of a couple of football pitches. I even noticed some live parrots scattered about the Aztec zone in the episode we watched- you know, just for shits and giggles. Here's a clip I managed to find of a team being fucking terrible whilst merely moving from one zone to another, which is an achievement in itself- the host quite rightly mocks them for it.

Anyway, in these four zones are a total of fourteen challenges, each one against a set time that could be anything from one and a half minutes to three minutes. The categories of challenge are mental, physical, skill or mystery. Each challenge has to be attempted by one person, and for each challenge they compete in they gain a crystal. A crystal? In a maze? Hmmmmmm. We will come to the significance of the crystals in a second.  One excellent thing about the show- if a player doesn't make it out of a challenge, they get locked in the room. It's quite easy for someone to get obsessed with the task to try and get the crystal and /or be too far from the exit to leave the room, to a chorus of "Run, you truculent fanny! Oh, you're locked in now... You fat-handed twat" from their adoring teammates. Those locked in can only exit the room when bought out with a crystal, but the teams are reluctant to do that (I'll get to why in a second). And some of the rooms are automatic lock ins- that is to say, if you fail to get the crystal, or breach the rules specific to that challenge then you have no chance to exit. Anyway, each crystal represents five seconds for the team members to be inside the Crystal Dome, which is slap bang in the middle of all the zones. In the Crystal Dome, there  is an industrial fan blowing gold and silver tickets all over the place, and the team have to throw the gold ones down chutes, BUT NOT THE SILVER ONES. One silver ticket down the chute means minus one gold ticket. The team have to get 100 gold tickets, which means they have to get 100 more gold tickets than silver ones. Couple this with the fact that the contestants quite often had brains made of custard and that the challenges were fiendishly difficult so they never got enough crystals and so they would never get enough time to get this stupidly large target and that it was very hard to grab the relevant tickets in hurricane force winds and that it was very hard to tell the gold and silver tickets apart anyway because the gold ones were silver ones with gold paint on and the paint had a habit of being blown off and it was a bit hard to beat the Maze. This is what normally happened when they got to the Crystal Dome:

Of the 83 teams who took part in The Crystal Maze, only 17 won, and plenty of those didn't count because they were the Christmas specials with a team of six kids who were told that whilst they inevitably didn't achieve the target needed for the grand prize, it's Christmas so we've let you win. I suspect that Channel 4 made it so hard to win because they'd pumped in £250,000 in 1990 (which in today's money is about £170,000,000) on constructing the maze alone, and could probably not afford to give out prizes. The Crystal Maze is the tempting stall at the carnival that's rigged so you can't win. I am not exaggerating when I say I remember an episode where the team trying to beat the Maze ended up with something like -54 tickets. The Crystal Maze may as well have been called the "Fuck you, you're not going to win anything Maze."

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