In the LANDMARK 36th edition of Lewis Murphy’s Fifty 50 Show, Lewis talks to himself about the latest gameshow news.
There you go, and now you can use this as a handy general post you can talk about Deal or No Deal or whatever in the comments.
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Don’t watch very often now and only caught the back half of this on +1 but when Deal has it’s big moments it still really has the ability to deliver, and I think connects the audience with the contestant like no other gameshow around – even if you haven’t watched their time in the wings.
Apparently DOND *peaked* at 1.2m. I can’t help but think with all the fanfare they were hoping for a bit more than that.
What’s Noel going to bang on about now though? Will he be pressuring players into going at the first offer?
Intrigued about the average therefore, probably not far off the 800k-ish it currently gets.
My base level of respect for the show and team is high, but I do also think I’d like to see them be good at another show now, I don’t really know how much it has left to give.
I agree. I wonder if there would be any mileage in losing the daytime show and taking it Live for a few primetime editions now and again (maybe two a week for a few weeks, like MPD) with maybe a bigger jackpot?
If anything the live shows proved you didn’t necessarily need to ‘know’ the players for it to still be entertaining.
I think Live ‘n’ Late Deal or No Deal would have some good Friday/Saturday night mileage in it, actually.
Fun fact: The show “Dalli Dalli”, currently shown on NDR (one of the “Third (regional) public channels”), will be shown on ARD in autumn, but not under its name (which is more than 40 years old), since the ZDF (which has shown Dalli Dalli in the 70s) gave the rights for the name to the “Third public channels” but not to the ARD. The ARD will name it after the most important catchphrase “Das war spitze!” (which means about “That was great'”). It has been one of the best game shows in Germany and the remake on NDR is really great as well! (I think you all have to watch at least one episode, though there are many word games, which might be difficult to understand.)
I have seen a bit of Dalli Dalli (good theme), there was a video of people trying to transfer water in their hats over a garden fence that was floating round a while ago.
I listened to the podcast last night and Lewis asked for opinions about how the situation about Break The Safe was handled, so here’s my two cents on the matter.
Well, first and foremost, with Break The Safe originally having its final round be all-or-nothing, having a game where nobody won is obviously a problem. If people see that a game is practically unwinnable, then no-one is going to watch.
He talked about shows that changed their rules between series such as Breakaway, and I remembered a show that changed its rules part-way through its series which was another Nick Hancock-fronted show, Duel. How it used to work was that after you won your second Duel, you could choose from 2 chips. One had a £ symbol and the other had a % symbol. If I remember rightly, the £ gave you £10,000 and the % gave you 10% of the current jackpot total, but you could refuse this to play your third Duel and, winning that, go on to the fourth where you had a shot at the jackpot, but you won nothing if you lost at any point. Where this fell down was that as soon as a contestant had the chance to bank some money, they were going to take it and leave the game so from episode 5, they changed the rules so that you played on no matter what and after you won your second Duel, you faced a question on the Accelerator, where you won more money for using less chips to cover the right answer, and did it again after the third Duel for double. Yeah, you lost some of the jeopardy as the player had some money come what may, but you actually saw people playing on for their third and fourth Duels to have a crack at wining the jackpot, which is what the show was ultimately about.
Going back to the main topic of the final rounds for Break The Safe being re-filmed, it was a very nice move by the BBC to allow the players to come back and have a chance to win something under the new rules. Note the key word there, CHANCE. While I felt for the couple on episode 3 not winning any money, it was their own fault because they didn’t get their timing right. When me and my mum played along, we both would have pressed at more or less the exact same time, and I had counted just past 30 seconds. The two contestants had pressed quite a few seconds after we did, so it was obvious to us that they were outside the 4 seconds of opportunity they had and lost. Going to the press about it and claiming they were scammed just seems like sour grapes to me. They were given another shot out of the kindness of the production company’s heart, but they failed and it’s nobody’s fault but their own.
And I agree with Lewis that shows that aren’t all-or-nothing are a welcome change to a majority of shows that are out there at the moment, because I prefer it when somebody goes away with something rather than feeling like the whole thing was a wasted journey, but it would be nice if the runners up left with something as well, and the only show I know that does this is Catchphrase. Runners-up on regular editions of Tipping Point don’t get to keep what’s in their banks, but celebs on the Lucky Stars episodes do just because it’s for charity? That doesn’t seem right to me.
Anyway, I’ve rambled on enough about this topic. That’s my opinion on the whole matter.
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT:
Let’s just say that for whatever reason the ladies decline the opportunity to redo their ending. How should Nick Knowles explain this amazing one-off change of rules on Twitter?
Well according to the ladies, they were told if they declined the chance, nobody else would get it, so there wouldn’t be a one-off rule change. But ignoring that…
Firstly, you air that episode first, assuming they’re not airing in recording order (and there’s no reason to). Having the rules flip-flop one way then the other is only going to confuse more. Alternatively you could air it last, but definitely not keep it where it is. If anyone else had turned down their opportunity, you lump all of those ones together, obviously.
Then depending on where you put it, you just have an insert shot somewhere of Nick saying the game has gotten a little more lenient/tougher when the rules do change. Since we know they’re not being 100% strict about the countdown clock matching to reality, the fact that it’s edited in will go about as unnoticed the edits for the final round that there already are.
To answer the actual question (that is, if the ladies had turned it down and their episode aired third, between two episodes with the newer rules): while I don’t think it’s Nick’s responsibility to explain this on twitter, I can understand there would probably be pressure on him to do so. My understanding is that most people on twitter are fairly thoughtless and assume because he’s hosting the show, he knows all the production details inside out and is responsible for all decisions. I imagine someone (either Thames or the BBC) would have given him an official line to say in this situation, else if I were him I would just keep quiet to avoid pissing anyone off. Because the only other option I can see is being honest, but then I’m not a PR guy who can put a spin on things in a smart way.
It’s pretty much a no-no to change the rules mid-series regardless of if you put it at the beginning or the end. The only show I can think of that just about got away with it was Duel, which was also quite badly thought out to begin with but at least made a convincing case for the change.
The problem wasn’t necessarily the fact that they replayed the game. It was the clock-and-dagger nature in which it was done: the ’emotional blackmailing’ of the contestants if they didn’t play ball, the hush-hush nature of it all, and the fact that it *appears* like they didn’t fully know or understand what was going on until they’d been hauled back into the studio.
If they genuinely didn’t want to take part in a second try then I imagine Thames/BBC would have been forced to drop their show from the run.