Fort Boyard (TV Series)

Fort Boyard (TV Series)

Fort Boyard is a French game show created by Jacques Antoine that was first broadcast in 1990 (as Les Clés de Fort Boyard, shortened for the second series in 1991) and is popular to this day. It has been re-made across the globe, successfully in many countries. Those include: the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Russia, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, and more recently in Algeria, Poland and Finland over a 20-year period.

Set and filmed on the real Fort Boyard in France, the programme appears similar to The Crystal Maze (which was created by Antoine for Channel 4 in the United Kingdom after Fort Boyard itself was unavailable to film in because of its then ongoing refurbishment). In both programmes the contestants have to complete challenges to win prize money. However, while The Crystal Maze varies the type of games quite considerably, Fort Boyard tends to focus mainly on physical and endurance challenges. Although Fort Boyard was something of a pioneer in the area of game show fear and adventure, later programmes such as Fear Factor have pushed things even further, requiring Fort Boyard to react and adapt with new twists and games, including a couple of seasons in which the contestants spent the night in the Fort (this was particularly popular in the French version).