Sunday Musings - Remembering Knightmare
Welcome, Watchers of Illusion,
To the Castle of Confusion.
Faze across time with us once more,
For this is the age of adventure.
I Treguard, Master of the dungeon, gift you audience.
Watch now you armchair adventurers.
While others braver than yourselves,
Challenge the secrets of my lair.
A quest is now in progress,
So here's a progress report.
(Treguard gives us the progress report)
And now, Time turns,
The fire burns,
(Fireplace starts going after it stops freezing)
Time out is gone,
The quest...IS ON!
I want to take you down a dark and dank corridor, past a moaning wall and into the magical place known as CITV. In a time where no more than four channels were viewable at any given time, there was a rationed approach to children's television where small windows of entertainment opened in a brick wall of soaps and daytime noise. One particular opening took place on September 7th 1987, and for those who knew the pain of going to school as a avid reader of The Hobbit, the world got a little bit more comfortable.
Knightmare came out the gate swinging (a broadsward). It took elements from everything in the Fantasy genre, mixing them into a VR potion was was greedily guzzled down by avid watchers once a week. It opened the doors in imaginations and fuelled discussions in the playground ("Has anyone actually completed it....?").
At it's core, Knightmare was fairly simple. A team of four children had to work as a team to decipher puzzles, answer riddles and defeat enemies to either escape an underground dungeon or complete a overground quest. Three of the team would be discussing and planning whilst one would be "in the world" by way of a helmet that blocked all vision that many a child would emulate with an office bin or cardboard box
The VR enjoyed by the out of world members (and audience) was the same used by weather reporters , and the poor suffocating member in the claustrophobic helmet was in one single room in Manchester. There are tales and rumours that the set dressing would often take so long, the team would grow bored and intentionally murder the Adventurer.
During it's existence, only seventy teams took part in Knightmare, and out of those, Only eight completed the game. What this says about either the difficulty of the eighties take on lateral thinking in schools is not for me to comment on, but as a viewer, the anxiety of having to walk carefully yet quickly over a crumbling bridge or dodge flaming arrows was palatable. Often with a toiling bell that signalled the end of an Adventurers existence. It always amused me that, after the horror of the CGI skull loosing flesh and eyeballs when death was immeniant, there was a shot of the team in a sun drenched vale that was meant to signify safety, but looked uncomfortably like the afterlife. Also possibly Teletubbyland.
Whilst the look of the world was cutting edge and walked hand in hand with the explosion in home computing it was only half the tale. The writing, the stories and the characters may have been painted in broad strokes, but the trope of actors took cutlery to the scenery in every opportunity, creating memorable moments that lived on in the brain for ages past the show. Hugo Myatt's Treguard infesting thoughts that automatically used "oooooh, Nasty" in any possible manner. Myatt was joined by David Learner's Pickle the Elf in the show's fifth year, and I want anyone to tell me that they didn't enjoy the hammy renditions of Mark Knight's Lord Fear whenever he arrived on screen. On top of that, there was Natasha Pope's Morghanna (who actually killed both Adventurers she encountered) John Woodnut's Malice, who once turned Treguard into stone and the Adventurer invisible to fatal results and a wonderful dragon that answered to two separate names...depending on his mood.
Knightmare by modern standards can be a slow burn, as one child is shouted at to walk in ever diminishing circles and three other loose the will to live. It was never an adrenaline filled explosive show, instead using short bursts of anxious commands and fearful viewers with large spaces of overwrought dialogue and riddles that needed to be considered in a calm and thoughtful manner, It was in turn a gentle, twee experience and a brutal and cruel one. It knew when to push the envelope into being so close to over the line of what it could and could not do, that it left a lasting impression at times of seeing or hearing more than you ever really did.
It was magic in a bottle, a moment of time that could not be repeated, and should not. Later attempts at such a form of entertainment never truly managed those heady heights, (though I would argue The Raven is a true successor), and is proof that love and care over a project is vastly more important than an eye-watering budget
Warning team, complete temporal disruption approaching!
Time is now the enemy.
(looks over to fireplace, which freezes)
(looks back to camera)
Oh dear, temporal disruption complete.
Time flies as the Romans would say.
And although all continues in your world,
Here time has flown.
All adventuring must now cease,
Until you faze with us once more.
Will our team triumph in adversity?
Or will the dungeon win once more?
And if so, why should you care?
For here, nothing is real.
And all must surely be an illusion.
Join us again for Knightmare.
And just keep telling yourself...
It's only a game...ISN'T IT?