There is a special pleasure in finding an old television still that feels like a room you could step back into. A low-resolution frame, a green shelf, fantasy boxes stacked behind glass, a presenter standing there in the middle of it all as though this entire lost aisle of British imagination has simply been waiting patiently for someone to notice it again.
That is the feeling of watching Ben Elton in South of Watford, especially the Fantasy Games episode: not polished nostalgia, not a modern documentary looking backward with a lecture prepared, but the thing itself, caught in its own time, walking around game shops, fantasy hobby spaces, and catacomb-like adventure spaces while the culture was still forming around it.
South of Watford was a London Weekend Television documentary series from the mid-1980s, and this particular 1984 episode looked at “fantasy games” broadly: role-playing games, solo gamebooks, and early live-action role-playing. It was presented by Ben Elton, and among the people connected to the episode were Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson of Games Workshop, along with White Dwarf’s Albie Fiore.
And that alone is a little miracle. Ben Elton, before he became permanently fused in the cultural mind with Blackadder, The Young Ones, stand-up, novels, theatre, and decades of British comedy, is there as a young presenter moving through the underworld of fantasy gaming. He is not sneering at it. He is not embalming it. He is letting it be strange. He is letting it be earnest. He is letting people explain why dice, books, maps, miniatures, foam weapons, monsters, and castles have power. In the best old television way, the programme feels curious without needing to become superior.
The Blackadder connection gives the whole thing an extra charge. The first series, The Black Adder, arrived in 1983, written by Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson, while the later and more familiar form of the show came when Curtis and Elton wrote Blackadder II, Blackadder the Third, and Blackadder Goes Forth. BFI Screenonline lists Blackadder as four series of six half-hour episodes each, produced by John Lloyd for the BBC, with scripts credited across Richard Curtis, Ben Elton, and Rowan Atkinson.
What is fascinating is how close these worlds feel. Fantasy gaming and Blackadder both understand rules, titles, costumes, absurd hierarchies, and the comedy of people taking imaginary power with lethal seriousness. A role-playing campaign has guilds, ranks, hit points, spells, treasure, referees, and elaborate codes of conduct. Blackadder has courts, trenches, royal favour, class panic, doomed schemes, status games, and endless verbal combat. One is played around a table or in a castle; the other is played on a studio set. Both are about surviving inside systems that are ridiculous but internally strict.
The catacombs are the best part. The episode’s fantasy-gaming trail leads into the world of Treasure Trap, one of Britain’s earliest live-action role-playing scenes, staged at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire. Conor Kostick, who worked around Treasure Trap in 1982–83, has written that it was one of the earliest commercial LARP systems, built around a fantasy game played inside a Victorian castle whose towers, gatehouse, dark passageways, and complex internal routes made it feel like a ready-made adventure world.
That image is perfect: Ben Elton descending into fantasy culture as though entering a comedy dungeon beneath British television itself. The game shop is the surface layer: the boxes, books, covers, dice, magazines, and painted promise. Then the programme goes lower, into the castle, into the tunnels, into people physically acting out the dream. It is so cool because it is not abstract. It is not “fantasy” as a corporate category. It is people building an imaginative machine out of paper, rules, costumes, corridors, and commitment.
There is also something deeply cozy about it, in the old sense of the word: not soft, exactly, but enclosed. A room full of game boxes. A documentary crew in a specialist shop. The flicker of 1980s videotape. British voices explaining niche hobbies with total seriousness. It has the comfort of a small subculture before the internet made every subculture instantly searchable, flattened, argued over, and merchandised. You can feel the physicality of it. Someone had to find the shop. Someone had to buy the book. Someone had to know someone. Someone had to hear about the castle.
That is why the still works so well as an image. It is already a thesis. It says: here is the pre-digital imagination, shelved and boxed, but alive. Here is the world before fantasy gaming became a default global language. Here is Ben Elton, future co-architect of one of the sharpest sitcoms ever written, standing among the materials of another kind of comic-mythic theatre. Here is Britain’s fantasy underground, captured by ordinary television and accidentally preserved as treasure.
And then there is Blackadder itself, sitting nearby like a future echo. The genius of the later series is that it turned history into a game board. Every era became a set of rules Edmund Blackadder tried to exploit. Elizabethan court, Regency politics, wartime command: each world was a dungeon with costumes. Baldrick, Percy, Melchett, George, Queenie — they are comic NPCs before that phrase became common outside games. Blackadder survives by reading the room, gaming the system, and finding the loophole. Usually he still loses, which is why the joke keeps its bite.
Ben Elton’s presence in South of Watford makes all of this feel connected in a lovely, subterranean way. He is wandering through fantasy gaming at almost the same cultural moment that British comedy was mutating into something faster, ruder, sharper, and stranger. He was part of the alternative comedy generation, but here he is looking at another alternative culture: gamers, gamebook readers, live-roleplayers, hobbyists, miniature painters, and people who wanted their stories to have rules they could touch.
The episode is not important because it “predicts” anything in a neat way. It is better than that. It shows a culture before it knew what it would become. Fantasy games would spread everywhere. Games Workshop would become a world of its own. Gamebooks would become childhood scripture for thousands. LARP would keep evolving. Sitcoms like Blackadder would become quoted across generations. Ben Elton would become one of those names that always seems to sit at a junction: television, stand-up, literature, theatre, politics, parody, and popular memory.
But in this clip, he is simply there. Young, curious, slightly awkward in exactly the right way, standing amid boxes and shelves and imagined worlds. Then, wonderfully, down in the catacombs, following the trail from paper fantasy to living fantasy. That is the charm. That is the cozy little portal. A half-hour arts programme becomes a secret map of British imagination: from the shop shelf to the castle corridor, from the rulebook to the line reading, from the dungeon to Blackadder.
I love finds like this because they remind you that culture is not only made by the obvious monuments. It is also made by small programmes, hobby shops, local scenes, unglamorous videotape, and curious presenters walking into strange rooms. South of Watford caught one of those rooms. Ben Elton happened to be standing in it. And from this distance, the whole thing glows.
