Matt Wilkinson's Blog

Contender ready? Gladiator ready?

The countdown is nearly over... on Sunday my favourite programme as a kid will be back and hopefully charming a brand new audience, it’s time for lycra, crash mats and ridiculous sounding names as Gladiators hits television screens once again.

Since the announcement was made that the show was coming back, I’ve been amazed at the amount of people I know admitting to being huge fans. Maybe you’ve found the same? - friends or colleagues you would never have thought would have shared the same fondness for it have all now owned up to secretly wanting to run the ‘Gauntlet’ or even just to have been sat in the N.I.A. with a foam hand chanting ‘Another one bites the dust…’

I remember, as an eager 12 year old, sitting down on my living room floor on a Saturday night with a shop bought pizza, a glass of coke and my best mate at the time and getting overly excited about the next round of contenders that would do battle against the Gladiators. It was always a favourite game of ours to try and guess what the next event would be and which Gladiators would be chosen.

My favourite events were always the more elaborate ones that must have taken an age to set up - Sling Shot (participants springing themselves off the ground with bungee ropes to catch coloured balls), Pendulum (the ball that swung from the ceiling) and Sky Track (Upside down Scaletrix - what a genius idea!) where as I used to hate the simple ones like Duel (the battle on two platforms with the infamous giant cotton buds) which I found a bit boring.

As for the Gladiators I found Shadows evil stare horrible (do you remember his eyes looking like they were popping out?). I could never work out whether or not Wolf had a normal side off camera or was always just nasty. Most of all I just wanted to be like Cobra with his Kung Fu style moves, I remember trying one of his flying kicks in my bedroom once and ended up knocking one of my shelves and twisting my ankle!

So the new series is with us this weekend and I just hope it’s as good as the original. To be honest I can’t really see it coming close, like the Johnny Depp Willy Wonka film that wasn’t a patch on the Gene Wilder classic. Then again who knows, I’m sure they’ll have been busy in the boardroom coming up with more extravagant ideas involving robotics, soft toys and 100mph speeding tennis balls!

M x

Posted by Matt Wilkinson on May 08, 2008 at 17:32PM

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