Knightmare
By Casey Douglass
It was a strange case
of knowing something but continually forgetting. I knew that the Challenge
channel showed the 80’s kids TV show Knightmare, but it's just
something that my mind regularly pushed back into the storage room,
with Teenage Mutant Turtle figures and Thundercats. Last night, due
to some half asleep channel surfing, that storage room door was flung open and the
horny (careful) helmet almost took my eye out.
Knightmare! The thing
that I knew...then didn’t...then knew again, on my TV, right there! I
was an eight year old again, enjoying the music and the tension and
bemoaning those damned ad-breaks once more.
Of course, the effects
and presentation have suffered horribly at the hands of time. The
dwindling health animation of the helmet and skin flying away from a
representation of the players face looked like something created in
Deluxe Paint 4 on the Amiga. The kids too looked typical for the
80’s, their hairstyles and clothes. I can't really hold it against them of
course.
The key elements of the
show still enthralled me though. The instructions given by the
dungeon master (Hugo Myatt) were immediately familiar, and the
incidental characters in this particular episode all gave their
performances with gusto. You knew that the people making the show
enjoyed what they were doing and cared. Something that feels lacking
in today’s kids TV.
I was a little
disappointed not to see Hordriss (Clifford Norgate) as I did actually
meet him once. He came to our local Jarrolds for a book signing. One
day after school, in the deepening dark, we went into the well lit store, weaving through the perfumes and floaty attendants with their drawn on eyebrows, heading
for the raised book area that had been earmarked for the meeting.
There he sat at a table, a big smile creeping out from under his beard. He then promptly got my firstname and surname wrong,
but I forgive him for that. Maybe playing Hordriss the Confuser is
just too hard to let go of?
I was going to say that
it would be great if Knightmare was resurrected. Looking around the
internet it looks like such a thing has almost happened a few times
but the results look poor. I will revise my opinion to one that
the format could at least be adopted. Directing a victim by teamwork through various perils, acting as their eyes or some other sense, it
is certainly a more tense prospect than some of the alternatives
today. I don’t want to rag on today’s kids TV too much, I know it
is not meant for me, and I am not old enough to pull off the grumpy
old git image just yet. I just can't help thinking that going back to
some of the ideas and formats of old would be a worthwhile thought
experiment, if nothing else.
What is your favourite
classic kids TV programme? Comment below if you dare adventurer!
