All the information is in the tweet. Amused by the Team Fortress-ification of Greg.
Apply for The Genius, if you want.
I thought applications opened a while ago, however there seems to be a new push – knock yourselves out.
Dealvent 2023
In 2021 I mused on Twitter AS IT WAS BACK THEN that wouldn’t it have been a good idea if there was a Deal or No Deal advent calendar? You have the natural daily box opening, perhaps there could be a bank offer behind some of the numbers, absolute easy cash-in from all involved. THEN Dan Peake thought that was a fun idea, let’s do it for real. Two successful years later it’s spawned a TV revival.
Well, it’s BACK for 2023, albeit this time it’s going to be not on Twitter (as it is now). There’s a WEBSITE (dealvent2023.com) and there’s a Discord server. Members of the Bother’s Bar Discord will see announcements, but for hysterical banter I suggest signing up to the Dealvent Discord.
The game’s afoot! You’ve got until Tuesday to collectively decide on an envelope number on the website. Good luck, wait until you see what I’ve got in store for you!
To reveal that she’s actually your girlfriend, turn to page 45, to keep quiet turn to page 23
The Traitors Interactive Game Book is out today. I wasn’t sure what to expect with it, so I was quite surprised to discover it’s basically a Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook as you negotiate your way through a game of The Traitors. There’s an interesting mechanic in that if you lose, you only have to go back to the beginning of that day rather than the beginning of the game, so no real need to hold your finger on the previous page in case you make a bad decision.
It also includes bonus content, the missions are replaced by various knock-off versions of popular social deduction games you can play with friends with a pack of cards and slips of paper.
The writing is quite witty, as you’d expect from The Word‘s Alan Connor, some quite amusing jokes and observations on What Other People Are Like from your perspective as a player.
I’ve only “done” Day One so far as it came out at midnight, but if that sounds interesting to you you can download it instantly on Kindle for a tenner, other bookshops are available.
Squid Game: The Challenge
Netflix from 22nd November and across three weeks
Coming just two years after the drama that inspired it, people went “hey that looks like fun, can we play it without the whole dieing thing?” then a year later Mr Beast obliged condensing the whole thing into 30 minutes, and now another year later Studio Lambert have this big-budget big-production version that intends to give away $4.5m to the lucky sod that engineers their way through to the end.
The reviews for this have been pretty positive, I just hope we’re not going to get an entire hour stroke ninety minutes dedicated to Red Light Green Light. By all accounts they’ve added and modified games used in the drama series to keep people on their toes.
We’ll see how much people really wanted this in the coming weeks, I’m not sure how much buzz there’s been for it really. Watched it? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Show Discussion: Deal or No Deal
Weekdays, 4pm,
ITV1
I ought to start by saying how much I enjoyed Deal or No Deal back in the day – in some ways it was the ‘making’ of this site, when people were offering live commentaries on a daily basis and I was stuck at work F5-ing like mad waiting to see what happened. Like most things that interest eventually wanes, but at its best Deal or No Deal was electric television and even years on after peak-Deal you’d occasionally find yourself at a loose end watching an episode and thinking “yeah this is a good television show isn’t it?” Partly the format. Partly the ability of unusual gnome Noel Edmonds to spin up the tension to extremely engaging levels. Partly a Banker with a wicked sense of humour and a very good ability at finding pain points. Partly the casting.
It’s only been seven years since it was axed so this reboot feels a bit quick – certainly the original is still in living memory. We don’t have unusual gnome Noel Edmonds hosting, now we have extremely slick magician Stephen Mulhern hosting – he is extremely good with the public, the jury is out as to whether he can spin the tension up in a believable way. I’m sure the casting will be fine. We will have no idea if the Banker is any good until broadcast. The format? Well, the second I saw the new board set-up my heart sank – sure, £100,000 is a lot of money but it’s clearly quite a lot less than the original. The fewer larger reds is what’s going to really kill it though.
Deal or No Deal is a game of luck, duh, but it’s a game about decisions and people living with the consequences of their actions. That’s where the entertainment is. It ought to be a rollercoaster, there ought to be moments of exhilaration and moments of regret. But the new board doesn’t allow for it, what the new board allows for is bank offers of between £2,000 and £5,000 for approximately fifty minutes, and if there’s a five-figure red still standing at the end (which the odds suggest will happen once twice a week, even if one of those reds is just ten-thousand pounds) maybe a slightly higher one in the last ten minutes. And that’s going to be an extremely stodgy hour of television to watch. I’d rather have £5,000 in my bank account than not, but as a TV journey I’m not sure if I can shrug any harder. Sure, a 1p vs £100k ending is universal, but the journey to get there certainly isn’t.
Tipping Point currently does about 1.7m in the slot, and we can take overnights as pretty much read for daytime entertainment, they aren’t going to add much in catch-up. I have no doubt this will open to similar numbers. I think it will be trending towards a million by the end of week 2. Thank goodness it’s not going in the The Chase slot as we thought provisionally, and I hope a lesson that if you can’t afford to do it properly, don’t bother doing it and do something else instead, it’s not like anyone was clamouring for a Deal or No Deal revival. Added to this there has not been a single successful revival of the format internationally in the last five years, and some big markets have tried.
Let us know what you think in the comments!