Rock 'n' Roller Gladiator Joust Hire

The Rock 'n' Roller is a giant inflatable gladiator joust, the sort you'll know from the Duel event on Gladiators or off Total Wipeout, where two of you stand up on a podium and try to knock each other off with padded poles. People ask for it under a few names, gladiator joust, gladiator duel, rocking joust, pugil-stick joust or just the Rock 'n' Roll joust, and they all mean the same game.

What makes ours different from a plain gladiator joust is the base. Instead of two fixed pedestals, both players share one round podium in the middle that rocks and turns under your feet, so staying upright is half the job before anyone's swung a pole. You climb up, put a head guard on, take a padded pole each, and go at it until one of you loses their footing and drops onto the soft inflatable floor that rings the whole thing. Then you climb back up and have another go.

It's two at a time with everyone else watching and waiting their turn, which is why a crowd tends to gather round it wherever it's set up. The people in the photos are mostly grown-ups and teenagers, and that's who takes it most seriously, though older children manage it fine too.

Size, power and setup

• Round inflatable arena, 8 metres across give or take, with the central rocking podium and a padded wall sat on a soft floor that cushions the fall
• Two padded jousting poles and the head guards supplied with it
• Runs off one blower on a standard mains socket, and it stays inflated the whole time, so it wants power nearby or a long lead to reach a socket
• Works on grass outdoors, or indoors in a hall if there's the headroom and floor space for an 8 metre circle with a bit of clearance round the outside
• It's an electrical item, so it can't sit out in heavy rain; under cover or indoors is fine

It always comes with an operator

This is one of the games we never send out on its own. A trained operator comes with it, sets it up, hands out the head guards and the poles, and keeps an eye on the jousting so it stays good-natured. Our staff are first-aid trained and enhanced-DBS registered, which is worth saying plainly for a school, a youth group or a corporate family day. Lee from CooperVision booked us for their staff forum's family event and emailed afterwards with "a very big thanks to the man you sent with the hire equipment for doing a great job and being very pleasant", and a thank you "from the coopervision staff forum and the children who enjoyed the equipment". On a game we always staff, that operator is a fair part of what you're hiring.

Where it suits

It does well anywhere there's a competitive crowd and room for people to watch. We've taken it to corporate fun days and team-building afternoons, council festivals and community events, school sports days, proms and fetes, and charity fun days, and it holds its own at an older child's or a teenager's birthday party too. If you're putting a few competitive games together, it sits well next to the gladiator jousting and the pole jousting, or the sweeper, the Total Wipeout-style last-man-standing game. The rest of the games range is on one page, along with the wipeout-style challenges and the corporate and team-building kit if that's the sort of day you're after.

The kit, the people, and the paperwork

We've run Monster Event Hire from our unit in Havant since 2002, Joanne and David between us, and the kit is all ours rather than sub-hired in, so the operator who turns up is one of our own. Being an inflatable, it's PIPA-tagged and inspected every year by an RPII inspector, and we bring an anemometer and work to a documented wind procedure when it's outdoors. We carry £10 million public liability insurance, indoors and out, with the certificate and a risk assessment yours on request, and we hold the additional licensed-premises cover that lets us work at pubs, clubs and bars, which a lot of smaller firms don't.

Where we cover

We deliver across Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and London, from Havant and Portsmouth over to Southampton and Fareham, and up towards Basingstoke, Farnborough and Guildford. Tell us the date and the venue, and we'll put a quote together.