Series One: 1998/1999
The Making of Fort Boyard
Fort Boyard was introduced to the British public by an excellent documentary all about
the filming and production of the action-adventure gameshow, appropriately named "The Making of Fort
Boyard". This programme was an hour long, just like the actual show, and was also shown at
the Fort's normal time, 8:00pm on a Friday night. It included interviews with the cast and crew,
as well as revealing lots of secrets from behind the scenes - some of which you can read
about in our brand new section, exclusively here at FBUK.
Team Profiles
At the beginning of each show, a series of five profiles of contestant statistics, like the one
to the left, would be shown on screen, providing information on each player concerning their name,
age, job, home town, likes and dislikes. For many their listed fears soon had to be overcome in
the ordeals - particularly those with a dislike of heights and creepie-crawlies!
Costumes
The costumes for series one were produced by USA Pro, and consisted of three main colours:
turquoise and navy blue (which were the two predominant colours), and orange. There were lots of
variations of costume playing with these colours in different ways, as illustrated on our
comprehensive Series One Costumes page.
Adverts
Channel 5 advertised the beginning of Fort Boyard on UK television back in the autumn of 1998
in style with a series of exciting adverts showing clips from the show, and introducing Melinda
and Boyard to the British public. You can see a still from one of the adverts to the left, and we
hope to bring a dowloadable clip of the entire advert to the site soon.
Articles
From the Radio Times:
Fort Boyard
Fridays C5
C5's new action-adventure game show is a curious hybrid of The Crystal Maze and
Gladiators. Set on a Napoleonic fortress in France, a team of five contestants fight
their way to the treasure room, battling against cockroaches, snakes, and a cage of tigers.
Presented by Melinda Messenger, the contestants must also contend with Leslie Grantham, who
plays the evil master of the fort.
From The Sunday Telegraph:
TODAY'S CHOICE
If Fort Boyard (C5, 6.55pm) stands out from the plethora of game shows across
the channels, it is because it is so spectacularly nasty. The idea (if that's not too grand) is
that a team of health freaks dress up in Lycra and race around a Napoleonic sea fort performing
(or in most case failing to) feats of physical endurance and fending off the advances of a wizened
professor speaking pidgin French.The programme is presented by Melinda
Messenger, the
vascuos-looking glamour model who has emerged as television's most ubiquitous torturess. Her
merciless reign has seen her presenting Beat the Crusher on Sky One, in which unsuccessful
contestants have to watch their car being
reduced to a cube of compressed metal and then hitch a
lift home, and Can We Still be Friends on Channel 5, in which participants must listen to
their former lover appraising their sexual prowess.
Fort Boyard sees Melinda is characteristically vituperative mood. One of her female
guests is marched to the end of a plank suspended so far above sea level that you can barely see
if there are any paramedics down there, and told to jump. 'Go on, Emma, go on, one-two-three,"
goads Melinda, who presumably wouldn't attempt the same feat herself lest she get a black eye.
Emma refuses and spends the rest of the programme skulking around like a beaten Labrador. At the
end of these humiliations, the five contestants with �4, 050. If they were to sue for emotional
damages they might get rather more. EB
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