[Brekkie]

One thing this revival has really done for me is given me a new appreciation of exactly how good Noel was at fronting the show. Stephen is OK but he's not Noel.

[Jon]

March 2009

youtu.be 

What's that Noel? The Banker's Gamble has never been offered on the £250,000?

December 2008

youtu.be 

Although he never used the word offered and if he’d used the word taken he’d have been correct.

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One thing this revival has really done for me is given me a new appreciation of exactly how good Noel was at fronting the show. Stephen is OK but he's not Noel.

I agree but that might be a blessing considering some hated how cult like the show became.

I don’t think many Noelisms have made it through phrases like east wing and west wing, which I later realised is actually taken from the final series of House Party are absent. That said you can tell Stephen is still rightly somewhat channeling Edmonds in his presentation style.

[SuperSajuuk]

I think offering the swap is fine and has been pretty much always been part of the format, although was only guaranteed with the jackpot in play at the end.

The Banker should be free to make jokey calls at appropriate times as well.

‘The Bankers Gamble’ or whatever they called it in the end is a good format point and should be in the shows arsenal but should be used sparingly.

I agree things like the offer button and Box 23 just complicate the game and don’t really add much. So anything like shouldn’t be brought back although the smaller twists in for example Christmas specials where contestants pick presents for an extra few grand are fine.

I completely agree here. Box 23/Offer button was dumb nonsense and I'd never want to see those back in the game, but the Swap/Banker's Gamble rarely appeared in gameplay and added an important jeopardy to the end game. As linked above, Alice became the second jackpot winner thanks to the Banker's Gamble, and it was only ever used when someone had dealt with a respectable amount of money and where extreme value differences existed on the board (eg 1p and jackpot prize).

The swap was usually just a random chance by the Banker, to see if he could get you to leave with virtually nothing by swapping unnecessarily, but when it became part of the format that "if you have the jackpot at the end, you always get the right to Swap if you want to", it made for a gripping end game because it became a 50/50 if they would win big or the Banker would win, and it also pushed the player to decide if their destiny lay with their randomly chosen box or the box out on the wings that they left to the end.

And as you say, the Banker should be free to call whenever if he just wants to get inside the persons' head, or to make jokes about what players are saying. I do hope that he develops those kind of things over time, rather than being procedural about his calls though.

[SuperSajuuk]

Sorry for the double post [only found this long after the edit window closed on my above post], but just found another video where the Bankers' personality had been properly developed, in this situation a player dealt at £20k and should have gone to the end as they would have been guaranteed a minimum of £75k (and had the £250k in their box), the Bankers' reaction before offering £140k is something that, while highly sadistic and mean, is a part of the show, so hopefully future series start to show the more "evil" part of the Banker: youtu.be  [this is just before the 1p is revealed]

[Brekkie]

So just over £120k given away this series, so an average of £6k an episode compared to roughly £16k in the original run.

[JAS84]

I would hope a second series invites the unused players back. Think they'll use Jamie to close the series considering they go to him most days for his read on the game. Probably Brian and Orla first.

You called it, it is indeed Jamie today - and he bottled it! Dealt at five boxes left but should've waited for the last offer.

[eyeTV]

How come there were 2 new players today?

[Jon]

So just over £120k given away this series, so an average of £6k an episode compared to roughly £16k in the original run.

That might have been why some of the offers seemed on the high side, they had a prize budget to use up.

[SuperSajuuk]

So with the civilian series over, it does look pretty promising that there could be future series commissioned on the same basis (alternating with Tipping Point) and maybe with a potentially higher jackpot prize. I would be surprised if the Celebrity DOND doesn't use the originals' board, since the money is going to a charity and not the player, but we'll have to see on Sunday.

Overall, I really enjoyed this series and its brought back all the emotions I used to feel in the original, but without all the extraneous fluff that started polluting the later series to the point of devaluing the money being won.

My only ask of the production company is to get the Banker to be more active with the show: call more often to annoy players at specific points if they're struggling with an offer he's given, offer the Swap if it benefits you [possibility of the player getting a very low prize money] and, if the player has dealt with the jackpot and a really low monetary value left, give the player the option to return the money with the Bankers' Gamble.

For me, the show was modern enough, and even if the prize board doesn't go up in future series for a while, £100k is still a lot of money for people at the moment.

[Brekkie]

It wouldn't have been commissioned at the payout rate that C4 had - and £6k on average is still above what Tipping Point, Lingo and Tenable pay out and might even be above The Chase average too.

It's not so much the lower jackpot that kills the game but the lower reds - having only 5 boxes of £10k and over compared to 8 previously. If they had just swapped out the £250k with £2000 then it might have played out better with more double figure boxes in play, though it raises the average value of the boxes by about £1500.

You called it, it is indeed Jamie today - and he bottled it! Dealt at five boxes left but should've waited for the last offer.

I think he took the sensible offer at the right time, even if it didn't play out that way. We've seen it go the other way so many times.

That final offer was ridiculous of £74,900 with £25k and £100k in play. Even if offering above average around £65k would have been more of a dilemma - you're not going to essentially risk £50k to win £25k.

Stephen annoyed me today saying that Jamie had always advised to play on if the £100k was in play which wasn't the case at all - he pretty much always called a good offer as the time to deal and always cautioned about rejecting real money with the risk of losing one or two offers which would bring down the game - and got the player to consider not winning what was in their box, but what the next offer would be and whether they would accept that.

I guess from the comment of the show being back "at Christmas" with celeb specials means they didn't think that would just be two days later than when the show played out. When is the second special BTW and who is the celeb?