Start the fans, please: Crystal Maze returns

After the success of the first series of The Crystal Maze in its new Channel 4 iteration with Richard Ayoade at the helm, it’s happily returning to our screens for another 12 episodes, including six celebrity instalments. A whole new generation of fans (pun intended) has been born, and it’s all thanks to an incredible purpose-built set located here in Bristol.

The Bottle Yard Studios sprawls across a vast site in Hengrove. Through a series of buildings and past makeshift greenrooms that look like temporary school classrooms, a dark corridor suddenly emerges into a vast 30,000 square foot warehouse: this is the fully-dressed home of The Crystal Maze during its gruelling fortnight of filming, with two groups per day led through the maze by Ayoade. The first stop on our tour, guided by executive producer Neale Simpson, is the Industrial Zone.

The Industrial Zone makes use of some of the original features of The Bottle Yard Studios

We pass around the propped-up plywood walls and emerge into a space apparently made from corrugated iron, where lights are rigged high in the ceiling and enough equipment for eight cameras to cover this zone alone is stored away in the shadows. There are doors and hatches everywhere, opening into little rooms where games are set up to play. Simpson ushers us into one split-level game, crawling in on hands and knees, with the encouraging words, “this game is great for inducing nightmares”. It’s a just a taste of the fun and creativity that goes into bringing the show to our TV screens.

Each game this season is totally new: it might riff on something seen previously, but nothing has been directly repeated, not even classic favourites like Spinning Planets. Anna Kidd is the producer responsible for coming up with all of this season’s games, and has designed tasks for other programmes including Big Brother, The Cube and The Generation Game. “I don’t think the games are tougher than before – but it depends on who is playing,” she says. “We test each game multiple times to get an average of how long it takes to play, and that’s how we set the time. Though, as soon as you put lights, cameras and Richard Ayoade in the mix, it becomes so much harder.

“For this series we came up with almost 150 games, which we whittled down to 70 and then pitched to the programme’s executives. Then we spent a day in a room working out two games of each type [physical, skill, mental and mystery] for each zone, to end up with about 30 games.” Superfans were even invited in to test the games on set, once they had been settled upon by Anna.

30 new games have been devised for the series, including Planet Wobble in the Future Zone

For Anna and her team, inspiration for games can come from many places. “Sometimes it’s a visual cue like a fiery skull, and sometimes it’s a game mechanic that inspires something. Ideas develop and evolve, and ridiculous conversations about the minutiae of about how something might work can turn into real, playable games.

“Everyone on my team is a massive Crystal Maze fan, and we were really keen to capture the feeling that is the essence of Crystal Maze, without ignoring the fact that we’re 25 years on: the bar has been raised and TV games have improved.”

The Medieval Zone’s fake flagstone floor has been salvaged from another set

A quick run from the Industrial Zone – happily we don’t have to crawl through a giant ventilation duct – is Medieval, an amazing mix of real and fake. Real ivy drapes across the MDF walls, while leaf litter gathers in drifts over polystyrene tiles meticulously painted to look like a flagstone floor. It’s all been brought to life by production designer James Dyllon, who also created the original sets in a very cold aircraft hangar during the era of Richard O’Brien.

“Back then, it was the biggest set on TV at the time,” he says. “This version is a three-week build from scratch, which is painted and built offsite and then dressed here. The Bottle Yard is brilliant for us as it’s an old industrial site, so we can add bits of the studio in as part of the set in places like the Industrial Zone, which makes the spaces we can use so much bigger. My job is to make it all look authentic.”

For season two, the team have stuck with four zones, though James hints at change coming in the future. “I would have liked to have done a new zone,” he admits. “But it’s a hard choice: do we recreate what we’re used to or do something different? We’ve kept the familiarity because of the fans of this show – they are more precious about it than us. I’ve got an idea for a new zone but I can’t tell you what. Somewhere that you won’t get sand in your turn-ups, like you do in the Aztec Zone now!”

Bristol24/7’s intrepid reporter Jess Connett (far left) in the Future Zone

From the low-tech dinginess of Medieval, we step through a pair of double doors into the gleaming white spaceship that houses the Future Zone, all lights and screens. There’s only actually one game room in this small corner of the set: by the magic of TV, when we push open the doors of the airlock, the backstage passageway that leads to a standalone MDF box the size of a double bedroom melts away, and we’re inside it looking at a set of wobbly globes painted up to look like alien planets. The paint is still wet after some heavy use necessitated a touch-up; it glows under starlight from hundreds of twinkling LEDs sewn into the black curtains that cover the walls.

The experience of being on set is a bit like being in IKEA: you’re ferried around a massive space without ever really getting a sense of the scale, because it’s so full of corridors that lead between different parts. We squeeze past a lighting rig on the way to the Aztec Zone that has a picture of reality TV star Rylan Clark-Neal stuck to the back of it, graffitied with a pair of goggly eyes and a message of love for Richard Ayoade.

He is just one of a host of celebrities who have taken part in the programme, with this season’s A-listers including Dame Kelly Holmes and MC Big Narstie, who both appear in the first episode.

Celebrities appearing in this season include YouTuber Alfie Deyes, long jumper Greg Rutherford, actress Jorgie Porter, Dame Kelly Holmes and MC Big Narstie

The Aztec Zone is the one place where you get a sense of the scale of the production: an enormous hand-painted backdrop that must be three storeys high runs for more than 100 metres along one wall, while more than 200 real plants sprout from the cracks in the walls. The lighting design is so good that it seems baking hot when we arrive to stand on the sandy floor, when in reality we’re in a chilly warehouse.

Out of the main studio, we follow signs for the Crystal Dome – and the canteen – and briefly find daylight before ending up in pitch blackness but for the sparkling LEDs of the Dome. We’re herded inside to get the full experience. Inside, the acoustics are bizarrely dulled, and then the fans kick off with a deafening roar and the air fills with gold and silver scraps and we’re fighting to grab them from the glass panels as the lights flash.

“It’s great that the Dome is in here now,” says production designer James once we’ve emerged, windswept, and a couple of technicians have used a leaf blower to reset all the tokens, painstakingly fishing out a couple that are stuck in the collection box on the door. “On the original set, it was literally in the centre of the maze and when we turned on the fans it would suck in all the dust and sand from the Aztec Zone and blow it into the Dome. It was a nightmare – it made the perspex cloudy.”

We all troop out of the set and back to the greenroom, where we’re presented with a surprisingly heavy, golfball-size Swarovski glass Crystal Maze crystal to take home in a little black box. It’s a childhood dream, and one that could only happen in Bristol.

The Crystal Maze returns to Channel 4 at 9pm on Friday, June 8. To find out more about The Bottle Yard Studios, visit www.thebottleyard.com

The Crystal Maze has also been immortalised in sculpture form as part of the new Gromit Unleashed sculpture trail, hitting the streets on July 2. Keep up to date with developments, including where to find the sculpture, at www.gromitunleashed.org.uk 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BjwPRY5n5Vn/?taken-by=thegrandappeal

All photography inside The Crystal Maze by Mike Thomas