Ramez Never Ends 

Artem’s seventh outing for Ramadan prank show favourite sends celebrities rolling… 

Nobody does celebrity pranks quite like Ramez Galal, star of MBC1’s annual Ramadan extravaganza. Each year celebrities are invited to take part in the most elaborate set-ups that Ramez and the team at Masscom.98 can cook up - and we know from experience that their imaginations know no bounds. The resulting mayhem goes out every day during Ramadan in 30 episodes. This year was appropriately titled, Ramez Never Ends, which we very much hope is true.

Artem technicians flew out to Saudi Arabia last month to support the shooting of Ramez Never Ends – marking the seventh time the company has worked on the programme. Artem’s fabulous, 6m diameter, rollover rig was shipped out to Riyadh and a luxurious ‘Sultan’s Room’ was built inside it. When terrified celebrities, escaping a rampaging bull at a restaurant launch event, took refuge inside the room with a heavily-disguised Ramez for company, they weren’t expecting to be rolling around in the soft furnishings as their world turned, quite literally, upside down.

No two years are alike in the Ramez world. Previous Artem builds have included a partial bridge structure on a Mad Max-type film set, which hinged forward on hydraulic systems to simulate a gradual collapse, tipping a car towards a deep dive into a pool where Artem’s 4 metre-long, puppeteered crocodile lay in wait, and a space-simulator capsule on a purpose-built theme park. The ‘Hop Drop Capsule’ unexpectedly left the earth and went out of control, requiring the celebrity victim to jump from height into a pool. Whatever the set-up Ramez is in the thick of it, unrecognisable in his various disguises and causing chaos wherever he can.

‘My favourite was the Ape suit,’ said Artem CEO, Mike Kelt. ‘We were asked to create realistic ape costumes for Ramez to wear and they were just amazing, if I say it myself. That year Ramez’s disguise WAS the stunt. He rafted up a river in the Malaysian jungle with his team and the celebrities (one at a time) and they faked some sort of emergency landing where they were then attacked by a marauding ape. The Artem technicians were hidden out of sight in a special hut and they had to dress Ramez in the suit in about two minutes flat so that he was ready for action before anyone knew what was happening.’

Other projects have included adapting and programming a giant robot arm and chair to whiz captive celebrities around a studio and installing a pneumatic scissor lift in the desert which created the impression that a Land Rover was sinking in quick sand. Many of the projects have also required pyrotechnic and other effects, to add to the general impression of chaos. The programmes have been so popular that a ‘Ramez Academy’ section was set up in a Saudi theme park and many of the props and builds were remade for the public experience.

‘What I like most about working on the Ramez projects is the variety it brings. It could be a large engineering project, a specialist mould or a soft fabrication challenge. Often the jobs involve specialist electronics or animatronics too. We look forward to seeing what next year will bring.’

Mike Kelt, CEO

See more information about our past Ramez projects in Our Work

If you are interested in hiring our Rollover Rig, see more information here.