Mediaeval Zone

[davidn]

After yesterday, I felt I should restore balance by posting one of the best things ever instead. Maid Marian and her Merry Men was one of my favourite programmes growing up (as I'm sure it was to many people who read this, owing a lot to the legacy of Blackadder), and someone's posted a clip from it that I had never seen before, where as the Sheriff of Nottingham and the castle guards try to rescue King John's idiot nephew Guy, it suddenly turns into The Crystal Maze.



Nowadays, this is a perfect tribute to the 90s - even besides the wonderful Richard O'Brien impression (harmonica and all), the whole style suddenly changes to the trademark shaky two-camera viewpoint, and they have a great only-just-lawyer-deterrent substitute for the famous theme music. It seems to have something of a Fun House flavour to it as well with strawberry jam flying everywhere, which The Crystal Maze never had (almost uniquely, for a programme at that point in the 90s) - I can't help but notice that Tony Robinson scripted this happening to just about everyone except himself.

I've downloaded some more of it now, and even though I'm a bit out of its target audience these days, I kept on finding things that I never noticed at that age, such as the rest of the episode being a satire of the Channel Tunnel, and the residents' resistance to the snail-eating foreigners stealing their jobs if an underground passage were to be built to Scunthorpe. And I laughed so much at the two-minute mark in this clip - this was a point where you could really tell that one of his main motivations in writing this was to have a turn at being the Blackadder instead of the Baldrick.

It says something that even in a world where the Sheriff is meant to be surrounded by idiots, they don't really appear any more stupid than anybody who appeared on the real programme.

Comments

[ethelfleda.livejournal.com]

It was on on my dad's day off, so many happy memories of watching it with my dad :)

[davidn]

The one I most remember was one that my parents happened to have rescued from the video archive, where they went to Skegness on holiday. I hadn't realized at that age just how inherently funny that was - or the meaning of the line "They've got more red tape than a Chinese video shop".

[kjorteo]

That actual Crystal Maze clip made the "make a spot of tea" parody make so much more sense.

[davidn]

I think, out of all I can remember of it, that was the most excruciating three minutes to watch that I ever saw - if the programme ever had a catchphrase, "I can't see what I have to do!" was it. Here, it shows that even Richard O'Brien was getting fed up of traipsing around with such idiots...

Nevertheless, I really miss it!

[kjorteo]

I do like his exasperated little "Oh for the love of... come with me, watch me do this, is this really so impossibly hard to grasp?" march at the very end after the game was over.

Admittedly, I didn't make the "U3 = go up three spaces" connection. If I were in there, I would have very easily found and pressed U3 on the board, because I could read the completed puzzle and see the corresponding space on the board fairly quickly--I'm not that stupid. However, if U3 just lit up and the game continued with no further hints or anything after that, that's when I might have blanked out and uttered your proposed catchphrase there. Failing to get as far as pressing U3, though... that's just sad.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

I am sure I watched that episode with the worst contestant ever when it was originally on. The other ones I remember when someone banged to get out with over 2 minutes remaining as he misheard them, and a really chubby guy getting picked for a physical challenge with was the aztec zone one where you had to climb over the grid walls.

The Maid Marian clip is very well done. The mannerisms were bang on and yet no mention of Mumsies!

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Maid Marian, Crystal Maze and Fun House all in one... I think that might just be the best television show ever made. Seriously, I have no words. :P

I miss the days when Tony Robinson used to do comedy rather than crappy archeology programs.

D.F.