The Crystal Maze

 

When I was at middle school I was allowed to stay up later on Thursday evenings to watch The Crystal Maze. I loved the theme tune (Zack Lawrence’s “Force Field”), hated the renovation of Industrial Zone to Ocean Zone, and scoffed at the I.T. executives and management consultants as they missed the crystals that were so obvious to their frustrated teammates. I planned the type of game I would pick (Mystery) and which zone I would want our team to start in (Aztec, so that we could kayak through the ‘jungle’ to the games arena).

When not pretending to be part of a Man. United-based fantasy game with my friend, I avidly played The Crystal Maze game on her Acorn computer (even though it would always crash during the last level in the crystal dome), and was overjoyed when my Dad announced that the Jones girls could each pick an item from the Benson & Hedges tokens catalogue and I found a handheld Crystal Maze game therein. The game bore little resemblance to the television show, taking the form of an impossibly difficult side-scroller with background music that sounded like a dying smoke alarm. I took the device into school in the hope of impressing my classmates but it was promptly confiscated by the deputy head.

The Crystal Maze still influences me today (and not because Challenge TV has it on repeat). When I was 11, I devised a series of Crystal Maze-like games to motivate me to complete my daily housework tasks. To this day there is part of my brain that approaches the drying-up as if it was a Crystal Maze game in ‘Chore Zone’, where the challenge is to carefully lift items off the monstrous pile on the draining board so as not to move anything else remaining on there, with 3 lives to lose before being ‘locked in’. Furthermore, like zombie videogames, the programme has embedded itself into my dreamscapes and I frequently have nightmares that Richard O’Brien forces me to play ‘Physical’ games.

As to the O’Brien vs Ed Tudor-Pole debate, I remain undecided. The latter lives in the same part of London as me and I often see him decked out in mock country gent garb as I wait for my bus in the mornings.

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