Wonderfully Weird Gameshow...

The Adventure Game - The main puzzle (episode 1)



A clip of the main presenters - or shape-shifting dragons- setting up the main puzzle for the celebrity and non-celebrity contestants in this wonderfully bizarre gameroom puzzle gameshow. An ingeniously, contrived and convoluted layout of this puzzle is explained by the presenters, in this masterhood of trickery, all this talk about left-handed screws, left-handed Grandfather clock, just layer upon layer of intricacy, it goes on and on. Snatch the key from the clown's face on the blue door to unlock the red door, ohhh, it's just nuts, then all three contestants have to stand in certain spots to allow ping pong balls in a tube/funnel levitate. ohhh, I'm getting a headache.

This was a pre-cursor to "The Crystal Maze", and whatever it lacked in budget compared to the latter, damn was it hard for a kid's show. Screened from the 1980-1986 on the BBC, the plot is, 2 celebrity contests and one normal person land on a spaceship on a planet called "Arg", and to travel through different rooms with different puzzles. Produced by Patrick Dowling, the show was inspired by the "Dungeons & Dragons" board game. The sci-fi element was implemented by Douglas Adam, famed for his radio series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

So on this planet Arg, were the shape-shifting dragon race of the Argonds. Maybe to look less ridiculous with men in suits, mostly they were in human form. In this clip we see BBC newsreader Moira Stuart, who was then an actress, playing as one of the Argonds. Argonds, by the way, was an anagram of "dragon". Moira starred as Darong, another anagram of the same word. Another famous face, or rather the face-behind-the-robot, was "Star Wars" R2D2 controller Kenny Baker controlled a talking and moving spider plant in later series, which was the ruler of the planet Arg, Rangdo. The butler in the clip was Gandor (Chris Leaver) was half-deaf and could only hear when he was earing his glasses. I'm sure the other actress is Charmian Gradwell playing Gnoard. The most famed piece of the show was the final round of cat-and-mouse-like proportions "The Vortex". This did not appear until the second series.