DEAL OR NO DEALNoel Edmonds' hit game-show Deal Or No Deal returned this week (was it ever away?) It's a very odd show, one that veers wildly from very compulsive to just plain tedious. If you're not aware of DOND, let me explain the simple premise...
There are 22 identical boxes, each one containing a sum of money ranging from 1p to £250,000. A contestant is chosen and has to basically open some boxes in each round, eliminating that sum of money from play, although they can never open their box until the end. Periodically, a Banker will ring Noel Edmonds to offer the contestant a deal to stop playing and walk away, for fear their box contains the jackpot.
The key factor is that if a player is brave (or foolhardy?) enough to continue, they could be left with the £100,000 box and the £250,000 box, so the Banker's offer will be somewhere in between (probably £180,000?) Well, that's the dream scenario, anyway. More often than not, players are offered something in the region of £20,000 mid-game, they choose to go on, and end up with sub-£10,000.
It's a simple game, really, but that's its beauty. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is essentially a pub quiz with progressively larger sums of money. What DOND does to keep boredom at bay shift the emphasis onto the players. The people. It's something Noel is very good at. Noel gets a lot of criticism, particularly after Noel's House Party crashed-and-burned in the late-90s (people forget how fantastic NHP was in its heyday).
So over the weeks we "get to know" all the players' personalities, share in the show's daft gimmicks (a lucky hat Noel sometimes wears, pointless hand-holding for luck, etc), the admittedly fun Banker-Noel-Player phone conversations, the legendary hotel where all the players hang out together over the weeks/months they're on the show, and everything else. The British version puts the emphasis on the people, unlike foreign versions. Most countries play the game deadly straight... and are still rating successes, but more and more of them are taking a leaf out of the UK version and making it lighter and people-orientated.
The American version is particularly notable for its HUGE sums of money ($1m jackpot), use of braindead models to hold the suitcases (boxes aren't glamorous enough?) and the usual US game-show silliness. Trust me, you'll be grateful we have Noel treating the show with his tongue-in-cheek humour.
Of course, DOND does have its flaws. No matter what they say, you can quite easily just watch the last 10 minutes and save yourself a lot of guff. In terms of the game, you don't really miss all that much, only on rare occassions when something startling happens early on. And, because it's on 6 days a week, the format does become extremely tiresome after awhile (I think it started in October 2005, and by March 2006 I know people who had become bored rigid by it).
One annoyance is that the game is essentially luck-based, yet the L-word is rarely mentioned... it's all "positive thinking", "game play", "tactics" and "systems". Hmmm. There is certaining decision-making and gambling involved, but Noel does seem to go out of his way to make it appear that the player has some kind of huge influence on things...
Anyway, Deal Or No Deal is back on Channel 4 in the afternoons, and it's still an enjoyable watch in small doses. Occasionally there's a really interesting game (usually when someone wins big, goes away with 1p, or throws the game away by getting too greedy). But, it's on its second season, and I don't think DOND has the kind of longevity Millionaire has shown.
The moment some flukey chancer wins the £250,000... just watch those ratings slide...
