The Cutprice Guignol

Sometimes, I wake up bolt upright in the night, palms sweating, eyes glassy, my mind grasping for a distant memory that I can’t quite put my finger on. Usually something to do with TV, now I think of it, actually, which probably says more about me than I’d care to admit.

But we’re not here to talk about that today, no – we’re here to talk about Raven, the impossibly niche BBC Scotland-exclusive gameshow that I dedicated a good two years of my life to obsessing over. The thing is, in the years since, I have come to believe that the show is little more than some bizarre, involved hallucination that my eight-year-old brain decided to conjure for reasons not entirely clear to me. When I bring this show up to people, I’m consistently met with looks of blank confusion. I’m pretty sure I have mentioned this show to people I actually watched it with when it was coming out, and I have been met with earnest bafflement. For the sake of my sanity, I had to cast it to the back of my mind for a while, until I was awoken from a peaceful (well, as peaceful as you can get, with a cat sitting on your head) sleep gripped by the memory of it and determined to prove it exists.

And, after some hard work (read: distracted Googling), I have confirmed that I am not entirely losing it yet, at least when it comes to this topic. The show really did air on BBC Scotland between 2002-2010 (before a brief revival in the later 2010s), setting six child contestants up to test their mettle in a series of fantasy-themed challenges led by the mysterious Raven (James Mackenzie) against the backdrop of, uh, Argyll and Bute. It really is the fantastical gameshow of my childhood dreams.

Sort of you. If you squint a bit. As with so many things from childhood, I had cast Raven in a slightly grander light than the one it actually claims. In my mind, the lives of the warriors, represented by brassy feathers on a staff, were snuffed out with a callous duty by the morally-ambiguous Raven, but in reality, someone just deletes the feather image file from the save file and calls it a day. The gauntlet the child warriors ran were these epic journeys of soaring highs and devastating lows, but they’re really just falling off a slightly mossy tree stump in a half-restored native forest. The drama of a contestant completing the final Way of the Warrior challenge is very clearly just some child being bundled off home with a bag of off-brand merch and a pack of gummy sweets. You get the idea.

But one thing that did not let me down upon my rediscovery was James Mackenzie as the titular Raven. He didn’t need to do all that for this performance, but I’m so glad he did, because this is still every bit of the hoot I remembered it being. He’s styled like the oldest member of a boyband doing a Game of Thrones cosplay, and the staff-brandishing ridiculousness is the absolute selling point of this whole pile of daftness. The animorphing into a Raven in the opening credits is just the ambiguously-medieval cherry on top.

All this to say, I was right, this show exists, and nobody should ever doubt any of my wild claims ever again. If you happened to be amongst the, presumably, half-dozen people who saw this show growing up, I am desperate to hear about it in the comments below – if not, what show from your childhood are you only slightly convinced actually exists?

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(header image via BBC)