Deal or No Deal?

MY GOD I HATE THIS SHOW. Where do you start? The presenter: most repellent piece of pond life ever to crawl out onto land. The audience: brain-dead, gibbering apes. The contestants (90% of them): same as the audience. The format: strictly for cretins. No general knowledge or intelligence required, just guesswork. It makes the average game show look like a new version of 'Who Wants To be A Millionaire', with the £100 question at the same level of difficulty as the million pound one. I keep thinking, 'surely this country's sunk as low it it can' - and then something like this comes along. It's a bloody disgrace. If a small meteorite ever hits Earth, one just big enough to destroy a single building, I hope and pray that it lands on the studio where this effluent is being recorded.

This pointless rubbish just involves random opening of boxes - there's no skill involved. When I watched the first episode, I was expecting that they'd move onto something better in later rounds, but it was the same boring thing throughout the show. I've never watched another episode.

I'll admit that I really enjoyed this show. Once. A welcome return for Noel and every game entertaining with the different personalities of the contestants.

Sadly, they've all run out. The show has become a stagnant shadow of its former self, and yet it still continues to run without any sort of break. Where the early shows had the anticipation of whether the quarter million would be won, the media ruined it by printing the first winner several weeks before it was aired, thus eliminating any point in watching this show. It's pure guesswork, that's all it is. And there's too much hype surrounding it even now. I, for one, have lost favour with it.

22 contestants stand with 22 red boxes in front of them. The computer selects one at random and he or she must come to the front of the others with their box. They must then select boxes from the remaining 21 to try and identify which ones has the smaller amounts of money to eliminate them while keeping the location of the big money in play until the end. At times here and there a mystery banker will call in to try and convince the contestant to sell him their box for a certain amount of money – to which the contestant must decide whether to "deal" and take the money or "no deal" and keep playing for more money.

I glanced at the viewing figures over the Christmas period and noticed that, at a time of a year with loads of films and television events on the box, that "Deal or No Deal" won the highest ratings on Channel 4. Confused I decided to watch a show to get a grip on what about this show was making it so well watched. After a short time I realised that this was very much just a big game of chance dressed up as something suspenseful, skillful and tactical. This dressing seems to be enough for many viewers but I just found it amazingly dull; each decision is delivered slowly and occasionally talked through but really it doesn't matter what number is "lucky" or who's birthday they represent, it essentially comes down to luck and being aware of the odds. It does confuse me that it should do so well on afternoon TV given that it follows Countdown – a show that is the exact opposite and requires a real word power.

It is to the credit of the producers that they manage to stretch it out for over 30 minutes and keep a reasonable air of suspense – again, not enough for me but it is obvious that it grips some viewers. They use the music well and the cameras are slightly wobbly and mobile giving the show the slight feel of a cop drama rather than a studio quiz show. A lot rests on the shoulders of Noel Edmonds and he tries hard but cannot convince with so little to work with. He talks about keeping it positive and he works the contestants well, stressing the need for them to do something (although they can only open the box in front of them). He says that he likes their style, likes what they are thinking, likes what they are doing etc; he does well to keep the mood of tension in the studio but to me it just seemed like he was desperately flogging a dead horse. His conversations with the banker are the weirdest thing I've seen in a quiz – we can only hear his side of the conversation and he then gets to build the offer up tension-wise, however he wants; it is just a little weird and false.

The whole show feels quite low rent and I do give credit where credit is due, because the producers have managed to squeeze so much tension out of it. Personally I just found all the talk of tactics etc to be pointless because the whole show is based on luck and a very small amount of playing the odds; for me it was only this latter section that was of interest but it made up so little of the show to be not worth the effort. So despite topping the Channel 4 ratings, I just can't see the fuss. Noel Edmonds seems to be really enjoying himself and be totally enthralled by every move the contestants make but this all exists in his head and, despite trying really hard, he just couldn't make me care about a series of rolls of the dice.

'Deal of No Deal' was for a time the biggest game show on British TV, with people throwing both love on it and scorn at the simplicity of its format at the same time.

That was part of its appeal really. You got to know the players during their time on the show, and genuinely wanted them to go home with big money. Some had systems, some had quirky personalities - it all added to the fun.

But like with all game show formats, it had it's time, and no amount of format tweaking could hide the fact that at the end of the day it was just someone opening boxes.

At the time of writing the show has recently ended, after 11 years. It was fun while it lasted.