Fortress of sillitude
A woman in a skin-tight ringmaster's suit whips a gong. Three tigers prowl below her in a stone courtyard, baring their teeth at the rusted gates. A spandex-clad songstress dangles from a trapeze, grasping at a key floating just above her head. A comedian plunges head-first into a container of cockroaches to find a ping-pong ball—without using his hands.
This isn't some frat boy's beer-induced fantasy, it's a French TV show that's been on the air for 25 years called Fort Boyard.
Needless to say, it's my new favorite show.
Fort Boyard was first broadcast in 1990 as Les Clès de Fort Boyard (The Keys of Fort Boyard) and is considered the precursor to many of the world's best-known game shows like Fear Factor, in which teams of celebrities compete in all kinds of crazy tests—some based on physical endurance, some on trivia, and most on pushing the participants' boundaries. (Wikipedia describes it here.)
My husband and I stumbled upon this show one night after dinner while we were flipping channels, our minds nearly mush from days of bank appointments, interviews and other "rendezvous" that required us to jump brain-first into a language with which we are familiar at best. (I've never flop-sweated so much in my life as when trying to communicate bank information to a man in a business suit at our local Parisian bank branch. Banks are confusing enough in my native tongue!)
When we lit upon Fort Boyard, we were immediately struck by the ridiculous set—the show is shot in the actual Fort Boyard fortress in France, so picture imposing stone walls, thick iron gates...and campy, indoor fun-house sets that are incongruous, to say the least—and the fact that a woman was standing barefoot in a tub of scorpions answering questions put to her by a man in the silliest "old wizard man" costume you can imagine.
This, my friends, is Fort Boyard.
We've since come to find out that the show consists of teams of celebrities competing to win money for worthy causes by completing challenges that win them keys and codexes. These challenges are not for the faint of heart, either: you might find yourself bicycling across a tightrope to grab a key, finding codes written on ping-pong balls buried in cockroaches and yelling said codes to your teammates so they can open a locked box that contains a codex—or any number of other physically and mentally daunting tasks. Win enough of these challenges and your team will be allowed to spend time in the "Treasure Room," wherein torrents of Euro coins will shower into a cage in the center of a stone courtyard where moments before tigers had prowled and you have just under three minutes to grab as much money as you can and dump it in a bucket—the amount collected is the total that will be donated to the team captain celebrity's charity of choice.
If your mind is spinning, let it. The game is beyond silly and knows it. The host wears a smirk for most of the show and flirts shamelessly with the female celebrities, and there are so many different characters—including Le Père Fouras (old wizard man), Blanche (sexy princess trapped in a white room with a white snake) and Passe-Partout, Passe-Temps and Passe-Muraille (three dwarves who run around handing out clues and locking people in prison cells)—costumes and sets that it took us a good three episodes to kind of figure out what was going on.
I think I need to go watch a few more to really nail it down...
#
No comments:
Post a Comment