Knightmare

KNIGHTMARE
Made by: Anglia
Shown on: ITV
Years shown: 1987-94

My mum took one look at the title sequence of Knightmare, with a animated knight riding into a Dungeons & Dragons style castle, and decreed that I wasn’t allowed to watch it. I only wish, when I occasionally sneaked the odd disobedient look at it, that it had lived up to her hype. Knightmare was in the same league as The Adventure Game, which ended a year before Knightmare began, except that the competitors in this virtual-reality universe were children and not minor celebrities.

Every week, a team of four children (who, tellingly, were usually boys) would be welcomed into the Knightmare castle by the dungeon master, Treguard of Dunshelm (Hugo Myatt), and one of them would be separated from his friends in order to be the pawn in their puzzles. This individual would have to don the Helmet of Truth, a big, horned hat which covered their eyes, and step into an empty studio. Except it wasn’t really empty. The other three children would be back at headquarters with Treguard, and on their screens they could see their friend in a virtual world which he could not see. They would guide him by saying, “side-step one to your right” etc, and he would have to go in and out of doors, collect vital objects, and try to avoid colossal bombs which were about to explode, at which point the kids would all yell, “There’s a bomb in the room!”, useless for someone who can’t see it. At the time, I thought the special effects were brilliant, but always got very frustrated and exasperated with the boffins doing the guiding; so did Treguard, and he would sometimes add, in his dramatic tone, “Time is running out, my young charges. You had better get a move on, unless you want your friend to be killed, that is.” The 'death ' of a dungeoneer could be tracked on the Life Force meter, a computer graphic of a dungeoneer wearing a helmet; as his 'life force' drained away, bits of the helmet would peel away, followed by the skin and then the skull. It was actually quite macabre for a tea-tea show, and I used to get very worried that the hapless kid would actually die (and not just be given a wedgie by his team-mates for being crap at following instructions.)

There was one particularly memorable room in the Knightmare dungeon, which involved a giant chess board; the kids would control their friend, but they would be playing against the terrifying Dark Knight, a huge, masked figure in a long cloak. If he caught the child before he finished the puzzle, he would engulf him in his coat and the kid would ‘disappear’.

I can’t remember what the prize was if the children won, but they rarely did anyway, and at the end of the programme, Treguard would offer some words of doom and gloom regarding their fate, and that of the next team of youths. Nice.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 6/10

(Thanks to wikipedia for the borrowed pic)