Trivia / The Crystal Maze

• Corpsing: In the third 2017 celebrity special, Tamara Wall was reduced to helpless laughter by Richard Ayoade's repeated mentions of balls.
• Enforced Method Acting: Mostly averted in that much of what the contestants do and say between the games is scripted (yes, really); they are filmed doing "noddies" when they arrive in each zone, where they each nod when Richard tells them about the zone. After they have "played" the maze, the contestants are then filmed again in each game, for the close-up shots. However, a few moments look as if they were genuine reactions; in the first series, some contestants have a "wow" reaction when they first see the Aztec zone.
• Old Shame: Edward Tudor-Pole seems rather reluctant to talk about his tenure hosting the show. Responding to questions about the show during a 2009 interview for DemonFM, he commented: "You've got to bear in mind I did it for five weeks about twelve years ago," and revealed that he only ever watched one and a half episodes of the completed show, "so I'm not an expert on it". Shortly afterwards he tersely moved the topic of conversation back to his music career with the comment, "Frankly I wasn't sent to this world to present game shows."
  Ed: I don't do bloody Crystal Maze!
• Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: Stephen Merchant had shaved his head for Logan, which happened to allow him to pay tribute to Richard O'Brien in the celebrity special.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: Since Channel Four couldn't use the real Fort Boyard, their set designer was asked if he could construct a similar setting. He replied he could, but it would be just as easy to have multiple zones with different themes. They liked the idea.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Numerous pundits have compared this series to the 1980-86 BBC children's series The Adventure Game, in which teams of three (two celebrities, one civilian) would have to complete various (untimed) games of skill and lateral thinking in order to get a crystal.^note  Though the crystals played a different role; they purportedly allowed the contestants to return to Earth from the series' setting of the planet Arg. And like The Crystal Maze, The Adventure Game had a Golden Snitch final round in the form of the Vortex; if the contestants solved every puzzle with ease, they could still "lose" if they all stumbled into the Vortex in the final game (which happened more than once).
  • After the original run ended, the UK did get its own version of Fort Boyard.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A couple of ideas the crew had for the new zone replacing Medieval in 2019 before settling for Eastern include an Arctic cave (rejected as the whiteness was too similar to the modern Future zone) and the Wild West (rejected as they felt due to size constraints they couldn't do a town justice, and a smaller saloon idea was seen as too limiting).
  • A second season of the American version was planned, but COVID-19 nipped those plans in the bud.