O'Brien: 'Maze casting was off-the-wall'

Richard O'Brien has said that it was an "off-the-wall" decision to hire him as the presenter of The Crystal Maze back in 1990.

The recently-named DS Icon suggested that the producers of the programme picked him as its host because of his supposed eccentricity.

O'Brien told DS: "I always thought that the producers must have described what kind of a show it was and thought, 'Ooh, a bit like Dungeons & Dragons, who would be a good Dungeon Master?'.

"I did say that to them and they said, 'No, no, we hired you because we liked your smile'. That worked! It was off the wall, casting me, but I did enjoy it because that really truly was happy days.

"Long days, tiring days, but everybody was really most agreeable on that set - not one a**ehole, not a single, solitary unpleasant person. It was fantastic."

He added: "It wasn't about the winning, it was about the taking part. The prizes were crap, weren't they? A day out at Hever Castle, or paintball shooting, or something of that nature. The prizes were really pretty tame.

"There was no money involved and they weren't expensive prizes, so it really wasn't about that. It was about coming down and running around for a few hours and testing out the games and just the joy of the day."