TV shows

Anyone who either knows me, or has seen my tweets, can’t help but notice I am something of a Wonder Woman fan. And it’s all because of Lynda Carter.

The former Miss America first slipped into the slinky costume of red, white and blue back in the 1970s for a TV movie called The New Original Wonder Woman, a wordy title designed to distance it from a terrible first effort a year or so earlier in which a blonde, tracksuited Cathy Lee Crosby played the super heroine but lacked superpowers, the iconic costume and screen presence (and the famous, catchy theme tune). Even earlier than that, the producers of the campy 60s Batman series sought out fresh TV gold from the pages of comic books and commissioned a short pilot film where Wonder Woman was played as a clumsy, single woman still living at home with her mother in 60s suburbia – the main joke appearing to be that as Wonder Woman she wasn’t nearly as attractive as she thought she was. A distinctly insulting approach for an iconic character. Both these curiosity pieces are available on YouTube if you want to lasso them down.

In the Summer of 1998, instead of playing football with my twelve year old friends, I was having a Knightmare. Successfully passing the audition process,  we arrive at the reception of Anglia Studios in Norwich. Here we meet the current team from Oxfordshire (who will go on to be the first team to conquer the dungeon). The production always holds one team in reserve as they never know when the next team will finish.

Taking us down to the studio to begin our adventure, we cross the floor over cables and past cameras to the three stools that sit in front of the chest. Treguard sits behind us and we do a run through of the first room to get rid of any nerves. I look up from the television in the chest, which is the same as for the viewer at home, and see one of the production staff walking around in red slippers.