Deal or No Deal

If this show was me talking about George Michael, I'd kill anyone I could to bring back George.

Do you know the story, of course, of he was watching Deal or No Deal just of a day and he saw a woman and she was trying to raise money for IVF and she got the 1p box right at the end.

She was so close.

And he was watching and he was so sad and he suddenly thought, wait a minute, I can do something about this.

Anyone can go on The Voice.

I was thinking more like Deal or No Deal.

Yeah, that's good.

Well, I just always thought, like, if I was ever gonna go on a show, that would be the one because you haven't got to get anything right.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if I was trying to win some pay, I'd go on Deal or No Deal.

[laughs] Nice.

Yeah.

If you've designed the format in a certain way, if the questions are at a certain level, you know, the same we, we used to know on Deal or No Deal, because of human nature and how it's played and the maths, you know what the rough average is going to be.

Some weeks it'll be much bigger, some weeks it'll be much smaller, but there's always regression to the mean, and you know exactly what, what it will be.

What Phil's picked up on here, quite rightly, is the, there is, there is a, a, a factor in The Chase which is different to those other shows, which is the contestants are playing against somebody, who are-

You worked with Noel, didn't you?

I worked with Noel on Deal or No Deal.

That's where I went to after-

Yeah

We wanted to get the perspective of a TV executive on this, so we spoke to Tim Hincks.

He's got his own production company called Expectation, but he's also a former chief executive of Endemol UK, where he oversaw programs like Big Brother, 8 Out of 10 Cats, Deal or No Deal, and Would I Lie To You, and many, many others.

Here's his take.

take.I think comedy is a really different beast from, from the other sort of genres for lots of reasons.

Just to project and, and ask the universe for things.

There is nothing I like more than thinking about Deal or No Deal and the mass psychosis of spiritualism that fled through that set.

It just-

When they were, like, holding hands and praying, and it's like-

... pretty much consistently.

I know he's had sort of lulls, but you know, just when you think he's gone forever, it's like Deal or No Deal, and he's back.

And that takes some doing.

That's the thing.

Yeah, I know.

It's real, real shame.

But yeah, Deal or No Deal was-- He was telling me about when he bought a taxi 'cause, um, he was fed up with sitting in traffic in Bristol, um, going into-

Oh.