Short Story (Feb 10)

I first saw Kafka’s Castle in 1983 or 1984, and even then it looked dated, although it was impossible to determine which period it was from. The show was airing on a Dutch TV station that seemed to have no set remit; porn would follow an American talk show which followed a documentary about origami that seemed to play every night. Nestled deep in the scheduling was Kafka’s Castle, part gameshow part hallucinatory experience that managed to convince me that I had imagined the whole thing. Soon after I forgot about the programme entirely. I got married, had two children, got divorced and then started living with a Polish girl ,fifteen years my junior, who was studying fashion at Wimbledon.

One morning I got out of bed to find her watching something on the computer; usually a Polish news-stream, so I let her be. When I returned from work she was in the same position, slouched over the laptop, engrossed in the show. It was Kafka’s Castle. The hours in the day had been eaten up by the gameshow, devouring her studies and her need for nourishment. In the evening we argued. Usually when we argued we would end up having sex and then all would be fine, but this time I went to bed and she went back to the computer to watch some more of Kafka’s Castle. That was in 2006.

By early 2008, or perhaps even late 2007, I was living by myself in a warehouse conversion in High Barnet. Most of the other conversions were peopled by young artists and designers, but they didn’t mind me hanging around perhaps because I was some kind of father figure to them. By then Kafka’s Castle had been picked up by one of the smaller digital TV channels and had become a cult hit among students. One of the games on the show, in which contestants had to talk about a given subject for two minutes while being punched in the face by the other contestants, had become a regular pastime in students bars around the country, at least a according to a report on BBC News 24. Eventually the format was syndicated or copied or plain stolen. ITV had a show called Hitchens’ Castle, and on ITV 2 they had Hitchens’ Castle Extra, presented by Hitchens the junior; Channel 4 opted for Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Castle while Channel 5 ran with Schama’s Castle; the BBC weren’t so blatant, instead creating a period drama within the world of Kafka’s Castle; soon Canal+ had Chateau Voltaire and MTV had Greer Vs Castle, a show that was in every way identical to Kafka’s Castle but for the fact that every week Germaine Greer was the only contestant.

Each show would be successful for a year or two, and when ratings started to drop the format and presenter would be adjusted ever so slightly. Schama’s Castle was replaced by Zizek’s Castle; The Castle Delusion was usurped by Castle Review; Greer Vs Castle became Amis Vs Castle, Prescott Vs Castle and then Gladwell Vs Castle. Tony Robinson, Naomi Klein and George Ritzer even got together to produce Gramsci’s Castle, a historical reenactment of what the gameshow might have been like had it been presented by Antonio Gramsci. By 2015 the format was dead, but TV channels had lost all bearing on what people wanted to see and had no other option but to continue rolling out more and more Castle gameshows. It wasn’t their fault, they didn’t know what people wanted. I had remarried by then and my wife was one of the few remaining hardcore fans, beyond elation whenever a new show started.

Eventually she left me for another man. He was slightly older than me but made up for it by being an expert the phenomenon of the Castle gameshows; so much so that he taught a module on them at the University of Westminster. It cut me up for maybe a year or year and a half, that she had left me for him, but soon I was over it. I wondered if Kafka’s Castle felt the same, considering how many times it had been abused by other gameshows, if it got easier each time a new Castle show was created. I started getting drunk and telling people that I had been a fan of the original show all the way back in the nineteen-eighties, before anyone else had heard of it, let alone all the imitations. I told them of the majesty and hypnotism of the original show, an element that none of the other Castle gameshows had captured. The truth was that I had forgotten about Kafka’s Castle after first seeing it in the hotel room all those years ago. But still I kept telling them how brilliant it was.