I like it when Deal or No Deal feature very odd offers from The Banker. Today's episode had the very odd offer of "£8,000 and a dead magpie".
If it was me, I'd have dealt at that offer. It's a win/win situation. If they don't give me the dead animal, I sue them for false advertising. If they do give me the dead animal, I sue them for cruelty to magpies.
Showing posts with label Deal Or No Deal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deal Or No Deal. Show all posts
Friday, 12 October 2007
Tuesday, 14 August 2007
Can I Poke a Friend on Facebook, Chris?
A new series of blog favourite Deal or No Deal started on Monday. (I use the phrase 'blog favourite' only to annoy everyone else who contributes to this blog.) I found it slightly disturbing watching it really. You see, I occasionally have dreams where I'm watching TV shows, and these shows are invariably different in subtle, slightly freaky ways. These are really astonishingly mundane dreams, but that's not the point. The point is that Deal* has been made slightly different in largely the same way. These are not changes what would concern any normal person - the set is slightly new, the opening credits are a bit different, some new incidental music, and the phone-in competition has been changed to appease ICSTIS (see How Dare You Mislead The Very Stupid? below) - but they concern me. Why can't everything just stay exactly the same?
In a move desired to drive lovers of routine and of slightly tired game show formats to nervous breakdowns, the same has been done to ITV1's premiere quizzer Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, only, this being ITV1, they've done it to a much less forgiveable degree. When Millionaire* returns on Saturday (with a special celebrity edition of course; this is ITV1) some changes will be afoot. Most notably, contestants will only have to answer 12 questions to win the prize. Cleverly, this has been accomplished by removing the first three questions that are pathetically easy anyway, so that the first question is now worth £500. Hopefully, this has been done with an eye to getting through more contestants and more interesting questions, but a more worrying and likely scenario is that it is so the show can be padded out with more crap like the 'text game' that has blighted recent series.
Not content with this change, the middle rungs of the money ladder have also been messed with. instead of the pleasingly mathematical-looking £4k-£8k-£16k-£32k-£64k-£125k-£250k-£500k-£1m, it will apparently proceed: £5k-£10k-£20k-£50k-£75k-£150k-£250k-£500k-£1m. While I can see some kind of logic in switching things around to put a smaller increase after the last milestone (now £50k) where there's no effective risk anyway, this clearly is just change for change's sake. It's wrong. I'm personally too old to be said to have grown up with Millionaire, but I assume kids today are born with an innate knowledge of the rules of the show in the same way I was with The Crystal Maze or Family Fortunes. I'm sure ITV1 will say they're trying to 'refresh the format' and 'shake things up', and the falling viewing figures may seem to justify this. That's all well and good with The X Factor. But there's a higher responsibility here. ITV are messing with our culture! (More specifically, 2waytraffic are, having recently bought the rights to the format from creators Celador. Just so you know who to write in to.) I frankly don't care if their viewing figures fall to three people and their pets. This sort of fiddling isn't going to help. Neither is finding contestants by audition as is now going to happen - it would take an entire new rant to cover what's wrong with that.
So stop it, ITV. Stop being useless. Please.
*Why anyone uses abbreviations like DoND and WWTBAM is beyond me. Look how stylish I look referring to Deal and Millionaire like that. Lovely.
In a move desired to drive lovers of routine and of slightly tired game show formats to nervous breakdowns, the same has been done to ITV1's premiere quizzer Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, only, this being ITV1, they've done it to a much less forgiveable degree. When Millionaire* returns on Saturday (with a special celebrity edition of course; this is ITV1) some changes will be afoot. Most notably, contestants will only have to answer 12 questions to win the prize. Cleverly, this has been accomplished by removing the first three questions that are pathetically easy anyway, so that the first question is now worth £500. Hopefully, this has been done with an eye to getting through more contestants and more interesting questions, but a more worrying and likely scenario is that it is so the show can be padded out with more crap like the 'text game' that has blighted recent series.
Not content with this change, the middle rungs of the money ladder have also been messed with. instead of the pleasingly mathematical-looking £4k-£8k-£16k-£32k-£64k-£125k-£250k-£500k-£1m, it will apparently proceed: £5k-£10k-£20k-£50k-£75k-£150k-£250k-£500k-£1m. While I can see some kind of logic in switching things around to put a smaller increase after the last milestone (now £50k) where there's no effective risk anyway, this clearly is just change for change's sake. It's wrong. I'm personally too old to be said to have grown up with Millionaire, but I assume kids today are born with an innate knowledge of the rules of the show in the same way I was with The Crystal Maze or Family Fortunes. I'm sure ITV1 will say they're trying to 'refresh the format' and 'shake things up', and the falling viewing figures may seem to justify this. That's all well and good with The X Factor. But there's a higher responsibility here. ITV are messing with our culture! (More specifically, 2waytraffic are, having recently bought the rights to the format from creators Celador. Just so you know who to write in to.) I frankly don't care if their viewing figures fall to three people and their pets. This sort of fiddling isn't going to help. Neither is finding contestants by audition as is now going to happen - it would take an entire new rant to cover what's wrong with that.
So stop it, ITV. Stop being useless. Please.
*Why anyone uses abbreviations like DoND and WWTBAM is beyond me. Look how stylish I look referring to Deal and Millionaire like that. Lovely.
Friday, 10 August 2007
How Dare You Mislead The Very Stupid?
I read today that Deal Or No Deal's phone in competition has landed the producers with a hefty fine because "some viewers of the Noel Edmonds-hosted show may have been induced to take part because they thought it was broadcast live, whereas it was actually pre-recorded".
And maybe they could have, but those viewers would have to be quite monumentally stupid. Because they watch Noel in his bad shirt refer to the winning caller whose name is on the screen now while carefully avoiding using the caller's name or any personal pronouns, a blindingly obvious sign of a pre-recorded show, but perhaps not as blindingly obvious as that time the newspapers reported the results of the quiz days before it was on TV. And they see him, wearing the same bad shirt, ask an audience member to pick a box and then have it opened and then he reads out the amount of money. Nobody could possibly think this is a live broadcast, and if they do they are so stupid that Channel 4 probably should have their money because they're likely to put it to better use.
And in any case, even if the boxed sums of money were predictable, given the right information, they were still random, so nobody has been misled. Besides which, at no point have Channel 4 ever pretended the show is live, and at no point did anyone claim the contents of the selected box weren't known -- except people in the pre-recorded show, who genuinely didn't know what they were.
Essentially, this is a rather chilling precedent: producers are now liable for the consequences of any insane nonsense that morons may choose to infer about their shows. I think I shall sue the producers of Heroes because I may have been induced to panic because I thought it was true, whereas it was actually fiction.
And maybe they could have, but those viewers would have to be quite monumentally stupid. Because they watch Noel in his bad shirt refer to the winning caller whose name is on the screen now while carefully avoiding using the caller's name or any personal pronouns, a blindingly obvious sign of a pre-recorded show, but perhaps not as blindingly obvious as that time the newspapers reported the results of the quiz days before it was on TV. And they see him, wearing the same bad shirt, ask an audience member to pick a box and then have it opened and then he reads out the amount of money. Nobody could possibly think this is a live broadcast, and if they do they are so stupid that Channel 4 probably should have their money because they're likely to put it to better use.
And in any case, even if the boxed sums of money were predictable, given the right information, they were still random, so nobody has been misled. Besides which, at no point have Channel 4 ever pretended the show is live, and at no point did anyone claim the contents of the selected box weren't known -- except people in the pre-recorded show, who genuinely didn't know what they were.
Essentially, this is a rather chilling precedent: producers are now liable for the consequences of any insane nonsense that morons may choose to infer about their shows. I think I shall sue the producers of Heroes because I may have been induced to panic because I thought it was true, whereas it was actually fiction.
Monday, 16 July 2007
Dealing With Loss
I promise I watch other shows than daytime telly, but today I saw Win My Wage on Channel 4. It's on in the afternoons after Countdown, in the normal Deal Or No Deal slot. Yes, despite what it may seem like, Deal Or No Deal is in fact only on for 48 weeks of the year. Presumably Noel Edmonds needs the time off in order to go on a worldwide bad-shirt-buying spree. Shirts that bad can't be easy to amass. Probably he visits secluded tribal societies whose sacred writings tell of a fabric of unparallelled ghastliness that he might take back to his blind tailor.
Anyhow, Win My Wage. It's quite a surreal experience watching it. It's as if Channel 4 genuinely hopes that the viewers won't realise that Deal Or No Deal isn't actually on, and have therefore constructed a crude simulacrum to put in its place. There's one contestant who plays sat in a chair facing away from the audience, and some more people who face the audience concealing amounts of money that the contestant can win. The contestant chooses between these people, hoping to eliminate the smaller amounts in order to claim the top prize. The difference (and I use the singular purposefully) is that the amounts of money are on cards instead of in boxes, and represent the annual pay of the person concealing them. Host Nick Hancock (who has the same numbers of letters in his names as Noel Edmonds. Coincidence?) drip-feeds the contestant with information about the 'wage-earners' to help them inform the choice. The amounts of money in play are arranged on a vertical game-board that looks strikingly similar to something else I can't quite put my finger on. When three amounts remain, the contestant chooses the remaining wage-earner he or she thinks makes the most, a correct choice resulting in them winning that amount. Before they decide, they can take Nick's offer to play for a lower prize in return for being told what the three occupations are that the remaining wage-earners do between them.
Astute readers may have noticed that this final decision would be easiest (insofar as it's not just a blind guess coloured by prejudice) if the three amounts left are the original highest amount and two lowest amounts. So it's probably not in your best interests to just get rid of the lowest amounts, leaving you with a tricky choice between three people all earning similarly. But they still cheer the low amounts going and boo the higher ones, because that's what they do on that other show. That other show will be back in a month's time. Maybe nobody will have ever noticed.
Anyhow, Win My Wage. It's quite a surreal experience watching it. It's as if Channel 4 genuinely hopes that the viewers won't realise that Deal Or No Deal isn't actually on, and have therefore constructed a crude simulacrum to put in its place. There's one contestant who plays sat in a chair facing away from the audience, and some more people who face the audience concealing amounts of money that the contestant can win. The contestant chooses between these people, hoping to eliminate the smaller amounts in order to claim the top prize. The difference (and I use the singular purposefully) is that the amounts of money are on cards instead of in boxes, and represent the annual pay of the person concealing them. Host Nick Hancock (who has the same numbers of letters in his names as Noel Edmonds. Coincidence?) drip-feeds the contestant with information about the 'wage-earners' to help them inform the choice. The amounts of money in play are arranged on a vertical game-board that looks strikingly similar to something else I can't quite put my finger on. When three amounts remain, the contestant chooses the remaining wage-earner he or she thinks makes the most, a correct choice resulting in them winning that amount. Before they decide, they can take Nick's offer to play for a lower prize in return for being told what the three occupations are that the remaining wage-earners do between them.
Astute readers may have noticed that this final decision would be easiest (insofar as it's not just a blind guess coloured by prejudice) if the three amounts left are the original highest amount and two lowest amounts. So it's probably not in your best interests to just get rid of the lowest amounts, leaving you with a tricky choice between three people all earning similarly. But they still cheer the low amounts going and boo the higher ones, because that's what they do on that other show. That other show will be back in a month's time. Maybe nobody will have ever noticed.
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