Cheap sets and a mad rush, but the Maze still has its fans

The Crystal Maze Channel 4, Sunday

s the children of the Nineties grow up to be television executives, so TV enters a period of calculated regression. TFI Friday, Knightmare and Gladiators have all been retooled and resurrected. Hollyoaks would probably be being remade, if they weren’t still making it.

So it’s a surprise that The Crystal Maze, once the most watched programme on Channel 4 (at a time when a lot more people watched Channel 4), hasn’t been dragged out for an encore until now. This was a game show set in a maze that was actually not a maze, but four interconnected zones – Aztec, Industrial, Futuristic and Medieval. Teams of willing punters rushed around playing games to win crystals. It was a game show devoid of all of the usual things that make game shows compelling, like a half-decent prize or a sense of jeopardy, and with Richard O’Brien as its presenter it achieved the unique feat of being camp, nerdy and a little bit weird, all at the same time.

The art of the remake is to concede that the original was a bit rubbish, without mocking it to the extent that it all feels a bit pointless. Crystal Maze v2.0 got it spot on – with Stephen Merchant (head shaved in homage to O’Brien) at the helm, the old show and its foibles were teased throughout. But the games, the five celebrities (including comedian Josh Widdicombe and Our Girl actress Michelle Keegan) playing them and the overall team effort were taken seriously.

Much fun was had at the expense of the cheap sets and the strange way everyone used to rush from zone to zone, even though they weren’t on the clock and it was palpably obvious that the Aztec Zone and the Medieval Zone were just back-to-back balsawood lean-tos. But the race for crystals remains oddly compelling. Merchant assured us several times that this was a one-off in aid of Stand Up to Cancer, but we know he was using “one-off” in a TV sense, where it means popularity

Abarometer. As with TFI Friday, if The Crystal Maze does big numbers we can be sure it will return. Start the fans.

It’s hard to credit anything on TV with being “horror” when the nightly news has Jihadi John and co doing their damnedest to redefine that word, but horror, of a sort, was the aim of Him, a new three-parter on ITV. “Him” (Fionn Whitehead) was the only name granted to a sullen adolescent whose parents (James Murray and Katherine Kelly) were long divorced. “Him” (and yes, the non-naming thing was as irritating to watch as it is to keep writing it) now lived between both families while feeling part of neither. He smoked weed, wore headphones and his only friend was his phone. The difference between Him and every other teenager avoiding eye contact on every suburban street was that He had supernatural powers – unplug His X-Box and He might just make a bookshelf fall on your head.

It all owed a lot to Stephen King’s Carrie – hardly an undiscovered gem – with elements of Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger. Him/He/Moody Stoned Teen was faced with the choice between using his powers for good or evil. Initially, he did what any teenage boy would do and chose evil, smiting down bothersome adults who asked him to do things like tidy his room.

The rule with the supernatural on television is that you have to introduce it very slowly. Otherwise TV’s smaller budgets and smaller screens tend to make things going bump in the night look daft. Him went straight in on the telekinesis, and so it was hard not to dismiss it as phooey. It would have been so much better if it had focused on the real-life drama of a teenager drifting away from his parents and wait to unveil the spooky hokum.

The first series of Danny Brocklehurst’s Ordinary Lies was a sleeper hit that got more recognition and viewers as the series went on. This was in part thanks to its structure. Each week a different worker at a provincial car showroom was the focus of the story. The cumulative effect was that, eventually, every character on the shop floor had a backstory and a secret or two, and that gave depth to their casual encounters.

You can be fairly sure, therefore, that the first episode of the second

Faced with the choice of good or evil, he did what any teenage boy would and chose evil