Ordinary Gweilo

I see that my estimable colleague Fumier QC has beaten me to the punch in reviewing the local version of Deal or No Deal.  I watched a few minutes of it last Sunday night, and although I have never seen the British version (which stars the formerly ubiquitous Noel Edmonds) it only took a few minutes to figure out what was going on (I haven’t seen the show, but I did read this quite entertaining article in The Guardian which explains how it works).

Deal or No Deal first appeared in the Netherlands (it’s owned by Endemol, the ‘Big Brother’ people), then Australia, and it has been quite a phenomenon in the UK, where it is extremely popular amongst daytime TV audiences (highly desirable demographics – young people with ASBOs, the unemployed, geriatric former barristers…).  It has also been entirely responsible for reviving Noel Edmonds’s career, which seemed to have been killed stone dead by the BBC a few years ago when they finally cancelled Noel’s House Party (several years too late, it has to be said).  Now he’s back and apparently one of the highest-paid broadcasters in the land – thanks a lot, Channel Four.

It’s basically a game of luck – the contestants have to choose the order in which to open the briefcases (each of which contains a sum of money from a HK$1 to HK$3,000,000), and they win whatever is in the last one they open.  Well, OK, a small amount of judgement is required when ‘the banker’ appears and offers the contestant a sum of money to stop playing and give up what they might have won had they continued.   

On the Channel Four version they have boxes, and they are opened by fellow contestants, but TVB Jade employ a selection of glamorous models (a.k.a third runners-up from Miss Hong Kong past, present and future) to hold the briefcases, open them when instructed to do so, and smile throughout.  What with that and the total absence of Noel Edmonds, I think I have to say that TVB’s version is superior in almost every way.