The Crystal Maze

“The Crystal Maze” was a British game show produced by Chatsworth Television and aired on Channel 4 in the UK from February 15, 1990, to August 10, 1995. The show ran for one series each year, with Richard O’Brien hosting the first four series and Ed Tudor-Pole taking over for the final two. Each episode lasted an hour, including commercial breaks.

Initially, the show was meant to be a British adaptation of the French program “Fort Boyard,” created by Jacques Antoine. However, due to the unavailability of the French set, British producer Malcolm Heyworth reimagined the show, incorporating themed zones to maintain visual interest.

The series is set within “The Crystal Maze,” which consists of four distinct “zones” representing different time periods and locations. A team of six contestants competes in various challenges to earn “time crystals.” Each crystal grants the team five seconds inside “The Crystal Dome,” the maze’s centerpiece, where they face their final challenge.

Constructing the maze cost £250,000, and it spanned an area equivalent to two football fields. At its peak, the show was Channel 4’s most-watched program, drawing between 4 and 6 million viewers regularly. In both 2006 and 2010, it was voted the “greatest UK game show of all time” by readers of UKGameshows.com, which described it as “a highly ambitious, high-risk show that paid off handsomely.”