Night image of the BBC building at Salford Quays

Knightmare on BBC Radio 2

By Keith McDonald

The knightmare.com team appeared on BBC Radio 2's Midnight Mastermind on Thursday 16 January.


Alan Boyd and myself joined the early morning show on BBC Radio 2 to quiz host Phil Williams about Knightmare.

Midnight Mastermind is a quiz at around 00:30 on weekday mornings where guests are invited to test the host on a specialist subject.

The host is not aware of the subject in advance. They only discover the subject when the guests are introduced.

They then have the length of one song to revise before facing three questions.

"I should have heard of it, shouldn't I?"

Phil Williams, formerly of Radio 5 Live, was sitting in for regular host OJ Borg.

Phil is a seasoned pro at Midnight Mastermind but didn't have the best record this week, so he was looking to make amends.

He wasn't optimistic when we turned up - he'd never heard of Knightmare before!

But he was intrigued about the technological side, seeing the chromakey setup as a precursor to VR.

After a chat about our memories and our contributions towards the legacy of the show, it was down to the quiz.

Black chair with leather padding in a spotlight

The questions

1. In Knightmare, a contestant (the dungeoneer) was placed into a virtual dungeon using blue screen technology. However, the dungeoneer was not able to see the virtual dungeon, so a prop was added to partially blindfold them. What was the name of the prop?

2. Treguard, the dungeon master, gave limited advice and help to the contestants. He had two assistants over the course of the show. What notoriously unpopular burger condiment shares a name with one of the assistants?

3. During their quests, the dungeoneer could replenish their life force by putting food in their knapsack. The life force was represented on screen by a meter that changed over the eight series. Which of the following was not used to visually represent dungeoneer's life force:

How did you do?

And how do you think Phil did - having never heard of the show before and with only three minutes to read up on it?

Have a listen and find out.

We're on from 00:30 - almost exactly 30 minutes in.

And plaudits to Phil for being a terrific sport and allowing us to talk about Knightmare!

(The episode is available for 28 days.)

Banner credit: Andrei Turca on Pexels.

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