I agree with most of that, although I think you may be putting the cart before the horse when you suggest that Knightmare series one was shorter becuase it was just finding its self. It was shorter because ITV only commissioned 8 episodes not knowing if it would be worth them spending there money on or not or even if it come be executed effectively and consistently afterwards. It clearly could but have only 8 episodes to play with no doubt limited a lot.

As I said I'm not sure I ever saw the first episode of Knightmare of even the first series. I suspect I may have done but think I may have joined it somewhere in the middle. It may also ben that i watched an awful lot of children's TV at the age so it might just have been part of my routine so how I came to watch it doesn't stick in my memory much.

But yes, all series need their first series to lay the ground for and indeed decide if there should be a second.

'See through' wasn't what I'm trying to suggest. I think many children's programmes can and do stand up to scrutiny even to adults. They are made differently because they need to address the audiences different considerations. But consistent children's content especially drama and comedy can be seen as highly good even by adults. Good stories are good stories.

My point remains that in series one for various reasons the stories are not as good as one might hope.

I'm trying to work on my own quest commentaries to explain my feeling about this more.

Knightmare began when I was 5 but I don't think I started watching it until I was 6 which would be series 2, it may even have been series 3 I hope to check later. It could, of course, have been series 1 you don't have much sense of series continuity when you're 5 something i hope to address in the commentaries.

I was particularly scared of that scorpion (which may answer the above question) and Ariadne which was creepy, I agree the Catacombites are scary, I'm not sure I currently remember the Automatons.

Treguard wasn't as menacing in earlier series as you think he was, another thing I address in the commentaries. He did however seem a bit patronizing. Telling the dungeoneers and advisers where they'd gone wrong after if was patently obvious.

First series' are difficult though I agree, though the second series is often considered even harder as you have to preserve the good things you've got.

I'm not sure Only Fools And Horses and The Big Bang Theory are comparable though because they are different types of sitcom.

It's often mentioned that Only Fools And Horses performed so poorly it was nearly cancelled and would surely have been had it been made today. The Big Bang Theory was made today.

To me the limitations of the first series of Big Bang Theory are down to artistic refusal to serialize from the get go. So many modern American series with the sort of full-length run U.S. shows often have are serialized because it keeps the audience engaged with the story.

This, however, is a bigger risk with first seasons because if you serialize them and they fail you end up with a lot more loose ends and possibly unresolved cliffhangers than if you do what BBT did in its first season and run it entirely procedurally even when it's asking to be serialized.

Just what I felt anyway.

But yes, you are definitely right Knightmare is awesome. I hope when and if I finish and publish may quest commentaries my level of appreciation will be clearer.

I'm a newbie to the site and feel I want to start with my assessment of series 1 and how they stand in relation to others people's and am attempting to be fair to both the members and the programme. It may not work but that is what I am hoping for. To do this I think I should note two or three things that should be borne in mind when assessing Knightmare.

a). The context,

As far as I can understand and remember Knightmare was originally transmitted on CITV from 1987 to 1994. It was the last programme in the after school transmission block each week and was also usually the last programme transmitted before CITV ceased transmission over Christmas. Only series 1 and 8 appear to end sooner.

It went out at the end of the year when the nights were growing cold and dark, which helped reinforce its mood, and, if I remember rightly, without any commercial break in the middle dividing the programme in two. These have been added by challenge and, I suppose, earlier the Sci-Fi channel to meet the financial needs of their time slots. This would explain the sometimes anomalous commercial cuts that I've read mentioned on the forum by some members occasionally. In the original transmission there weren't any so technically they're all wrong.

b). The audience,

Knightmare is an awesome programme and worthy of the ratings in got and awards it received and surely didn't deserve to be axed when it was.

Nevertheless, it must also be remembered that, as I understand it, most of the members of this site are adults who meet to discuss and consider Knightmare through a lens of nostagia. In this context and with us being older it is hardly surprising that we might be inclined to view Knightmare more critically than we did at the time when we were impressed by how fresh it was and, lets not pretend otherwise, scary. It was easy to get carried away with Knighmare at the time.

The addition of commercials, which I don't believe it had at the time, makes this harder. It means were more likely to switch our critical faculties on while we wait for it to come back. We struggle not to think about whether it's worth waiting for or not. Well, so I would imagine anyway.

c). The content,

Despite those facts the show does stand or fall on it's content and this is what our critical mind will test.

So first the positives. Well, it works. It doesn't look a mess, you can see what's happening and follow what's going on. And the characters work well even if we don't get to see them as much as was probably intended.

Then the 'negatives'. Negatives are annoyingly easier to delineate than positives. The fact there will be more negatives below than positives above should not in anyway be taken as suggesting the negatives outweigh the positives.

Much is made of how 'difficult' Knightmare seems to be. It often looks 'harsh' as many here have described it, unforgiving is a word that keeps occurring to me. It looks like a team's visit to the dungeon can be ended because of a mistake they made about three rooms back which they couldn't have known they were making because they didn't do quite well enough on the puzzle. It feels inherently unfair.

On the other hand, evidence does suggest that there were generally multiple ways to solve any given level, a team had probably, in fact, made several mistakes in making that one, BIG mistake.

That said, this is where our critical faculties really come into play as adult perhaps more than they would have when we were children watching at the time. Because, I know that in spite of myself, I can't help thinking, 'these deaths are stupid.'

That's feels incredible judgemental. I'm an "armchair adventurer" and an adult and these are children often being panicked into error by 'life force fading' or other warnings of imminent danger or death.

But the deaths still look stupid. 50% of them (1, 5, 6) are completely anti-climatic: the game just stops because the team made a choice earlier which means they can't proceed now. A literal dead-end. The resolution of the story is entirely exposition.

That, I feel, may be the only actual problem. Knightmare is a series of loosely connected but independent stories. When a team loses, the story can seem unfinished especially if the endings are as unsatisfying as the three mentioned above.

The first series must be considered as poor stories, at least on the evidence we have, better stories later solve this prove greatly. Other objections I'm not sure are as bad as they seem.

Certainly some teams are slow and this tries our patience. Back in the day we'd probably have been glad of the opportunity to take in the scenery which we'd never seen the like of before. This days we're impatient for the quest (and story) to proceed.

The other principle objection is the repetitiveness of the script but again this is likely due to how we are perceiving the show now. This was done for editing purposes and to convey the necessary information as succinctly as possible. Temporal disruption was certainly nothing any of the teams actually seem to have experienced so far as I can tell, although I expect the quest probably actually suspended from one room to the next while the designers changed the computer programme and applied other elements of continuity. But I expect you'll know better than me about that.

Back in the day I expect with a week between each episode we'd probably forget at least for a couple of weeks that the script gave us deja vu and just imbibed the information.

I hope this, perhaps, overlong introduction of my rambling thoughts is acceptable to the community who have had time to read all the relevant pages while at the moment I just want to get on with what I registered to do and read them if and when they become pertinent.

Sorry for the ridiculous length, briefness is not my forte.