Who'd Have Fort It?

I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in Denmark, watching the French (original) version of Fort Boyard with Danish subtitles. Fortunately, the premise is sufficiently obvious that the language barriers aren't causing me any major problems. I have even been able, using a combination of my incredible deductive mind and my almost uncanny grasp of French (I couldn't solve the wizard's riddle in the tower, so that tells you how much French I know), to work out the differences between this and the English version, and it really hammers home just how poor our version was.

The French version is, if I have inferred correctly, a clearly fantastic show worthy of counting The Crystal Maze among its offspring. Look, it even has a crystal in it:


The contestants are currently competing in little individual "duels" against oddly bemasked enemies. The duels are very silly tasks, but they win 15 seconds of time every time they win. I have no idea what this time is for, but it will surely involve collecting bits of tin foil from the air.

It also introduced the split-screen format later used by the first three series of real-time drama series 24. This was used because (apparently instead of the silly bit with keys at the start of our version) all the contestants must play in one long game, to get the aforementioned crystal. I saw one player, in a diving suit, reading some underwater instructions to another player, via radio, who had another part of the instructions, while some other players had to work to open a gate. Eventually, they all met up in the crystal room and collected it.



The dwarfs are present in both versions. The French one is also enhanced by apparently having the heterosexual male contestants wear blue t-shirts and the women and homosexual men wearing pink. I'm fairly sure one of them is a transexual.

It appears that importing French TV shows is not a good idea. A holiday to France introduced me to a show called Interville, in which two teams, from different towns, play games against each other and try to win a prize. There was exactly one good thing about the show, and that was the bull which terrorised the players while they were trying to perform some harmless task or other. This was removed for the British version, called Simply The Best.

The One Where Underdog Gets Away

It's a very human thing to root for the underdog. That's why there are no films about a boxer who is expected to win, triumphing over no adversity, and coming out, as was presupposed, on top. I always wanted the kids on Knightmare to do well. Of course, they never did. They'd always get killed in a corridor of blades, or accidentally issue their interpid duneoneer clear and explicit instructions to walk off a nearby cliff. But the fact that almost nobody ever won that show (eight teams won it altogether) meant that every contestant was an underdog, and since (unlike, say, Fifteen To One, there was no requirement for any of the underdogs to win, it made you want them to do well. It made me want that, anyway. You may have just wanted it to go away. The same is true of the even more unwinnable Takeshi's Castle. You always want someone to win, but they never ever did. (I'm told exactly one person ever won Takeshi's Castle. I think they got a silver-plated chequebook and pen or something.)

So why can't I apply the same logic to The Crystal Maze? The contestants on that didn't win very often either, and there's no requirement there that anyone should, and yet invariably you sit there for an hour just hoping that they'll all get locked in before they reach the Dome and there'll be nobody there to gather tokens (and then in one case the screen would go black and it would tell you that the team captain had died since the show was filmed and you'd feel all guilty, unless like me you have no heart, in which case you might vaguely wonder if he died as a direct result of his apparent inability to complete simple tasks). My theory is that it is a survival mechanism.

The players on Takeshi's Castle and Knightmare didn't win much because those are genuinely difficult games. The contestants on The Crystal Maze didn't win much because they were a bunch of incompetent blundering buffoons. Yesterday I watched a woman with bad hair wire up a giant button to a giant battery and then stand around like a mute Dalek trying to work out what she had to do next, as if it was somehow not the most obvious thing in the world. I think that if you were rooting for them, you would get frustrated and tear out all your hair. Then you wouldn't get a date and wouldn't reproduce. This is an evolved survival mechanism.

If we wanted contestants on The Crystal Maze to win, we would die out. That is clearly scientific fact.