When I was a child, I was simply ravenous with desire to appear on the Crystal Maze. I’d go sleepless nights dreaming about squinting uncomfortably as relentless studio lighting bounced and danced from Richard O’Brien’s impeccably bald head. I’d imagine wearing the ‘all-weather’ tracksuit and running at speed to keep up with Richard as we moved seamlessly but chaotically between challenges. Sometimes, I just sat agog wondering how someone of such thespian heritage became so good at navigating labyrinths.
Of course, there was only really one part of the show in which I wished to participate. I’d tolerate hopping through the sun-drenched Aztec zone or the sci-fi discomfort of the Futuristic Zone. Sure, I’d run around with Greg the accountant from Bromley or Sue the copywriter from Stevenage who has four teeth all vying to lodge permanently in her bottom lip, but I’d only be hanging in for the final challenge.
For those of you who have not seen the show it works a little like this. Everyone gets dressed in North Korean shell suits and casts off the shackles of their boring existence to complete physical and mental tasks and win highly coveted Swarovski crystals. Naturally, you are guided around the complex maze of challenge rooms to that final challenge by that curiously competent alopecian – Riff-Raff from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Ultimately, Riff-Raff leads you to the final challenge where you exchange your crystals (rather than steal them which makes a lot of economic sense) for five seconds of time spent jumping around like an attention-deficit dwarf in a crystal-shaped wind tunnel trying to catch little paper tokens. But there’s a catch and it is this…
Gold tokens good… Silver tokens bad!
Now of course, when you are hopping around like a donkey on amphetamines and have the guts off a hovercraft engine firing jets of compressed air at your genitals, it’s pretty difficult to be discriminative. Unless you are some kind of mechatron or eunuch you just have to close your eyes, take the pain and grab every little shiny piece of paper you see.
My personal tactic would be to sacrifice the less athletic candidates (essentially the rotund, portly and those who enjoy a somewhat strained relationship with aero-dynamism) and have them lie on the floor obstructing the jets of air. Then, it’s simply a matter of picking the tokens up from their trampled beaten corpses and posting them through the ever so civil letterbox which has now become the sole source of oxygenated air for the entire crystal.
Of course, such a tactic would allow you to be more selective of your token choices and increases the likelihood of you picking up those coveted gold tokens. To win the game, your team had to post 100 gold tokens through the said letterbox and ensure each one was not cancelled out by posting those dastardly silver tokens. Somewhat cheaply in keeping with the fantasy of the show, the gold tokens were simply silver tokens that had been sprayed gold pre-production. The impossible task of collecting these phony gold tokens was then made all the more difficult as the turbulent airstreams stripped the gold tokens of their colour and returned them to a silvery shine.
‘Fix!’ I hear you cry…
I guess though, that simply made it all the more meaningful when a group actually won the game. Teams were rewarded with ‘the adventure holiday of a lifetime’ and more often than not it was. Of course you felt sorry for Keith from Blackburn who shook with fear when rewarded for his aptitude at solving lexical challenges with the cave-diving tiger fighting road trip from hell. You felt equally sorry for 79 year old Betty whose best Inca-trekking days were surely behind her even if she could win crystals in 20-seconds for solving four thousand letter anagrams using only a spoon and geriatric sensibility.
Primarily, you probably felt a little bit sorry for yourself knowing that you’d never got to be part of that winning team. First, you’d imagine Nigel from Lincolnshire having the time of his life while wrestling whales on the moon. Then you’d imagine little Naomi from Trowbridge battling to keep her huge teeth in her head as she hurtles parachute first into a vat of your childhood dreams in Disneyland. Then you’d run upstairs – weeping probably - and draw pictures of yourself in stylish Pyongyang coveralls darting around the Industrial Zone with your teammates – and friends – Dennis Bergkamp and a young Isla Fisher from Home & Away.
But then, times were simpler then…
