To be clear, these are promotional pictures – and not the Tribune team

AT its peak in the 1990s, nearly eight million people used to tune into The Crystal Maze, easily making it Channel 4’s ratings winner.

Allowing for the circle of life, that should mean there are still at least four million people out there who fondly remember watching cocky estate agents in crap jumpsuits mess up its challenges while Richard O’Brien played his harmonica and whispered to us about how silly they all were.

And of those four million, it’s a safe bet that a lion’s share would’ve loved to have tried it themselves.

That’s not a bad market to target then for The Crystal Maze Live Experience in Shaftes­bury Avenue, which we tried last week – especially as the younger staff here seemed happy enough to play despite never seeing the show before and having the adventure explained to them with YouTube clips and the unhelpful humming of the bracing theme tune.

If you are in the same age bracket: well done for reading a local newspaper, tell your friends to put down TikTok too, but here’s quick run-through anyway. Your team tackles four “zones” of a wider maze and in each of these there are rooms for games of up to three minutes in which you must try to win a crystal. If you don’t get out in time, you are locked in and your pals have to decide whether to buy you out or leave you there to contemplate why you couldn’t solve a well-dressed Christmas cracker riddle and leave within the allotted time.

How well you do determines how long you will get in a fan-filled dome at the end in which your irrelevant final score is worked out by catching golden tickets in the bluster.

Got all that? In the medieval zone, there was a climbing wall over a floor of spikes and a spot of archery, while the futuristic zone had a glow-in-the-dark soft play area in which lasers had to be avoided – and a cell in which body parts were inserted into a dying alien with giant tweezers.

You will perhaps recognise the latter as a engorged version of the children’s game, Operation!

The Crystal Maze always did have the feel of being a place where adults could be kids again, providing them with one last chance to put on a romper suit and dive head first and screaming into a really good adventure playground.

You can wear your own clothes here, by the way.

There were more puzzles in the industrial zone including catching falling balls with a mechanical piece of guttering, before we landed in perhaps the most famous one of them all, the sandpit of the Aztec zone, on a slide.

The time had zipped by, partly due to an engaging performance by our host. Ours was Professor Why, who must utter the same repartee every hour, day and month but does so with an energy that would fool you into thinking it was his first run.

Some of the challenges were completed quite easily, one or two were harder, but it must be tricky for the makers to gauge the difficulty for different groups, particularly as some will bring teens.

It wasn’t ever boring, though and, most importantly, everyone will feel good about themselves at some stage during the 90-minute process, even if it was just for guessing a nursery rhyme from bashing a set of colour-coded bells in the right order.

The use of the space is quite clever too, draping the attraction so the maze progresses up and down to fit in with the Piccadilly architecture. This isn’t set in some out-of-town warehouse.

Original TV host Richard O’Brien

A couple of times, like slow golfers at the ninth, the team behind was in danger of catching us up, before we were guided up some stairs and out of sight.

The finale might be where a very good production does itself a slight disservice.

Not because of the wildly overpriced souvenir photos you are cajoled into posing for, but the dome – and this sounds like I’ve been in lots more glass domes in my life than I have – feels like it needs to have a few more jets to look like what we saw on the telly. It needs to be more blowy.

It’s also stretching credulity that they have a machine to instantly count the scraps of foil we had collected; it’s probably easier to make up a total to send every team home happy.

It doesn’t really matter – not every booking will be taken by a group of cynical journalists.

While “Experiences” are booming across the country as we look for more memorable nights out for our money, they have had a mixed press.

The comical mess of the Glasgow Willy Wonkaland last year stands out. More recently, another Channel 4 success story, Taskmaster, has been turned into one, but received sharp cash-in criticism for high £100 ticket prices.

Crystal Maze Live is a little cheaper and what you get is better than alternatives our office has tried before, notably the understandably short-lived Tomb Raider Live experience in Camden.

But it is still expensive and maybe it’s one to convince your boss to pay for under the campaign that the office needs Christmas party bonding with something more than karaoke.

Recommended.