Here’s quite a good thing from our very good friends at TV Cream, it’s their top ten Rules of the Gameshow, featuring extended versions of clips you’ve already seen and interesting clips of things you probably haven’t, like Brucie going into the audience. Plus lots of Surely-Should-Be-Sir Fred Dinenage!
Apparently Tuesday’s Deal or No Deal “will blow your mind”. So there we are.
Oi Deal,
Please don’t show mind-blowing things when I’m doing exams.
Ta very much,
Disgruntled Viewer
@TVCreamrulesofagameshow – loving the Gambit intermission.
And the organist was Bobby Crush’s dad, apparently*
(*may not be true)
Here’s some fun, Series Two of Whodunnit? with Jon Pertwee is out now on Network DVD.
They’re really hyping today’s Deal aren’t they? And judging by their tweets it looks to be something new rather than a perfect finish again.
I wonder if it’s the presaged Dickson Gamble where a higher/lower amount combination is put on the board to tempt a contestant back into the game?
Mondays Deal was very emotional, poor Rob. Wonder what will happen tonight, I’m on the norfolk broads so will prob miss it. boooo
I caught the last 20 minutes by accident on More 4. Worth watching if you didn’t see it yesterday.
Mmm. Didn’t see it, did read about it. I am reminded (*) of seeing a contestant in the early days of UK WWTBAM? who was very visibly uncomfortable to be there, possibly even to the point of tears, clutched on to a big green frog (?) throughout, used lifelines early on and took something like £4k home. Then again, that’s a natural consequence of WWTBAM’s contestant selection policies, whereas the situation described yesterday sounded like stunt casting – either a brave piece of casting that went wrong, or a deliberate piece of casting to give the viewers a likely uncomfortable show of a sort that they haven’t had for a while, if ever. I’m prejudiced, but the latter seems distinctly likely.
It raises a serious point about representation in, and access to, game shows, but I don’t feel qualified to start the debate and do it justice.
(*) Translate this as “I hope that at least one of you will validate me by saying that you remember it too.”
I hope that at least one of you will validate me by saying that you remember it too.
Now you mention it, yes. I have the early days of January ’99 in mind, for some reason.
(checks , £1.99 from remainder stores circa 2004. Cheap at half the price.)
Paula Wellfair is a name springing to mind. Possibly incorrectly. Probably incorrectly.
It was Zulma Dudgeon, an American born contestant was the one who held onto a frog and left with £4,000. This was half way through series five (November 1999).
I missed his biography and just considered him as a contestant. I think that’s probably the best way to treat the situation.
Re: Today’s “mind-blowing” Deal or No Deal
At the risk of annoying Endemol (although they’ve given away enough spoilers about this game themselves already), I’ll say that I was in the audience for it and that there’s no twists or altered gameplay/amounts or anything like that. It’s pretty much a vanilla game as far as the basic rules go. However, I fully expect KP’s brain to go into utter meltdown.
Well that was idiocy of the highest order. I’m all for players taking a punt, but she could gamble £110k on red/black at a casino and get better odds than that. Unbelievable.
Unbelievable, I absolutely agree. After it had all played out she admitted to Noel that “maybe I got a bit carried away there” (that line didn’t make the edit). But the great thing is that she was still smiling even after the reveal, and was clearly genuinely happy with every decision she’d made. Not every player goes away from the game feeling that.
Where’s CMD to say “Negative EV!” when you want him?
Oh, they made a big fuss about the final offer being above the mean in the studio, some of which did make it to the final cut of the show. (However, I’m not sure how many players actually understand why that’s significant anyway.)
When he said he had one more trick up his sleeve I thought he would say “tell you what, stuff the offers, you can swap the box if you want and that’s it”. But I never expected the offer would be above the average,
At work until 5:30 today.
It’s not that -EV, really, when you consider P(win in a casino)=18/37 rather than 1/2, and her utility function might rate the utility of winning a quarter of a million pounds on TV considerably higher than that of winning £140,000 on TV and £110,000 more at a casino. Can’t hate other people for having different utility functions to you, really; at the end of the day, that’s the foundation of politics.
Though in practice, yes, I think it’s quite likely that she just got carried away. Good. Glad that happens from time to time, though I wouldn’t want it to happen too often.
I doubt that, in the cold light of day, she’d agree that the £20k difference between the TV and casino scenarios was worthwhile. I’d wager most people would have pretty similar utilities for winning £250,000 on DoND or privately in a garage forecourt by a scratchcard. If anything, most people would prefer to win privately to avoid scroungers, I’d fancy.
I think you’re overlooking the fact that winning the top prize on Deal or No Deal does offer a person a certain amount of, for want of a better word, glory. Laura won the quarter mill over four years ago now, yet her name is still bandied about on the show pretty regularly and probably will be until Noel hangs up his flowery shirts and retires. For some players, the lure of having that kind of notoriety can be quite appealing, I’m sure.
I’m not overlooking it at all. I’m saying that £20k is a crazy amount of money to blow for the sake of being on telly.
I think it could *just about* be justified if you were trying to become £250k-aire Number One and, I dunno, you were trying to prove a point to the Banker to show no mercy and maybe get higher offers for the people that would come after you. But Number Four? No way.
Glenn and Richard knew she was a threat. Which is why she had higher than normal offers. They must’ve read something on her application we didn’t know about. Maybe they knew she was determined to win either £250K and nothing else.
I’m not surprised with the above average offer. The majority of the contestants on the show these days does not consider the average or any calculations by reading the board. I bet (except Dom) the other 20 players didn’t know how important the average figure can play into the game. These days the contestants would deal for something they came to Bristol for and hardly look at the board and work out the possible future outcomes.
I’m also not surprised that she had came to “play the game”. Nearly every single person who said that receives the value of the box on the Pound Table.
Which basically means they’re not playing the game, but instead are there to role the dice and ignore the game (metaphorically, the equivilent of not bothering trading in monopoly and just seeing what the dice gives you…)
Now, that’s not to say that everyone should take the box, just that the game is the deciding if the offer is good enough for what the box is currently worth based on the amounts remaining and the stage the game’s at.
I hear this, but I’m afraid I think it’s rubbish.
The game of Deal or No Deal is basically anything the person playing it determines it to be.
Here’s fun – a pilot called Your Case or Mine filming on July 9th (THIS IS MY 30TH BIRTHDAY, COINCIDENTALLY):
http://www.lostintv.com/tv_show.cfm?f=1306260836335&content_type_id=258
Basically a quiz-of-war over a briefcase full of money. I’m sure David B had this very idea for an endgame once upon a time.
Oh, nice. If they’re actually using a briefcase of money on a two way conveyabelt, that’s going to have a nice physical aspect to the presentation.
Yes I did vaguely, a very long time ago, but it was more of a Noel’s House Party gunge tank kind of game. The gunge tank would be overhead and the contestants would answer questions to ‘bat it back’ to their opponents on a kind of chess clock basis.
It’s Grand Slam meets Gunge ’em in the Dungeon from Motormouth – and yet, somehow, so much more!
I wonder whatever happened to Steve Johnson? A quick search suggested someone of that name had a show on Discovery, Model Mania, a few years back. Obvious guess would be panto but even that doesn’t throw up anything quickly.
Ooh, I saw something like this on Bishi Bashi Special for the PS1. There’d be a bonsai tree in a pot on the conveyor, and you’d have to press the right button at the right time else you got a face full of tree. Of course, as it’s a game, the conveyor starts off slow, and rapidly speeds up to the point where it’s just impossible to do in real life.
There was also the reverse, where the player was on a conveyor, and the computer decided to change it whenever it liked.
In other news, Jeff Stelling is quitting Countdown 🙁
Yes, bit of a shame, that. Not sure it’s a good career move either – he’d likely have more longterm success at Countdown than Sky which have a bit of a staffing reputation akin to Logan’s Run.
Hardly a bad move on his part – he is a sports broadcaster after all, not a quiz show host, and has something like 15 years expeirence at Sky and is getting one of their flagship roles in fronting Champions League coverage, which isn’t going anywhere in the near future.
As good as Countdown has been since he easily became the best host since Richard Whiteley it is now surviving from year to year and it only takes one idiot to come in at C4 and look at the ratings and forget the 30 years of history and simply swing the axe. Ironically though a new host might give it an extra year or two grace.
Oh, no! 🙁 🙁
Although one has to admit, this was always possible following the whole saga with Richard Keys and Andy Gray…
Tim Vine or Ken Bruce, anyone?
I would make time in my schedule for the show if Tim Vine or Gyles Brandreth hosted.
Would Gyles work well with Rachel though?
Why not just give the hosting role to Susie Dent. Saves money by reducing the amount of on air staff, and she’s warm, well known by Countdown viewers, and highly likeable.