To both of those comments:

Okiem's game...I watched that again a few weeks ago. Remembered in my mind for one spine-tingling moment - box selection 20, third and final box of round six, last box of the game. He's had poor luck throughout, turned down £2,500 on four blues and £35k. Miraculously, the big one has survived to this point. Okiem needs one more blue, that's all, just one more blue number.

The audience and contestants are in a frenzy, roaring Okiem on like an army. He makes his final selection. Noel, visibly and audibly shaking and on edge, bellows, 'CANDICE OPEN BOX TWENTY'

Candice opens box 20. It's £10.

I'm surprised you didn't criticize his decision to turn down £2,500, Daniel.

11 years ago was Susan's game, one of the best and most underrated games and characters of early 2007. She dealt at £42,000 on a 50p/£100k finish, and totally SPANKED the banker by only having the loose change in her box!! I believe Susan and Calum were the only games that EVER produced £40k+ final offers on a blue/£100k finish in active play?!

Susan's departure from E11 and subsequent wing replacement also marked an event that caused a surprising amount of controversy on here

Good call, Mr ACB! In fairness he did have £750 as a back-up, and although I can't actually remember what the likelihood would be of hitting both the highest amounts in the same round, I'm sure there wasn't much of a threat that it would happen, statistically speaking. £2,500 wasn't exactly a fantastic offer either, talking in tactical terms now; it was low enough that Okiem considered the gamble worth taking, and also low enough that the figure itself wasn't cause for deep thought anyway. So the banker put himself in check-mate with that one, and I can definitely see why Okiem decided to give it a shot.

A decade ago, Courtney Cox lookalike and once forum regular Sarah spanked the banker after dealing for £18,500, which was desperately needed after 3 trainwrecks preceding it, perhaps best known for the banker shooting himself after the proveout went Sarah's way following the deal!!

Although this week in 2008 ended with 2 much-needed great OPWs, the 3 trainwrecks at the start of the week had sadly set the tone for much of the year

12 years today was the very first game I watched from beginning to end. Germaine, from the North West.

His final round was a bitter pill to swallow at the time, his 5-box was £1, £3k, £35k/£50k and the crackpot. Having found £3k first, all he needed was to say ''Matt, noomber 8'' to see the £1 and we'd have likely had our first jackpot winner at quite an early stage in the show's history. I wonder how different that would have made things? Many casuals that made up the heavy hitting 3-4million audience were simply waiting for someone to ''finally win it''... they'd keep on waiting until just into the new year of 2007, allowing DOND to have a 'peak' that spanned all of 2006. Had Germaine won it in March 2006, would the show have lost its lustre in an era which is now defined as the absolute golden age? Hmm.

His final offer of £75,000 was derided by everyone at the time, even in-show (unthinkable in an era when every offer had to be clapped even if it was for The Banker's nail clippings in a suspiciously yellow-ey sock). Of course, as I probably pointed out before, 1p Trevor would have certainly set the precedent for ''not that high, really'' final offers between a blue and the £250,000. His offer would have been £50,000 max.

6 years ago, Damien had one of the worst crashes ever. No-dealing £40k at 8-box, only to have the near-impossible £425k nightmare round! After that, he was left with no more than £20k at 8-box and sadly went away with £1. This game pretty much set the tone for the remainder of March 2012, which was very poor month for both the show and the forum sadly

7 years ago, Danielle has another total trainwreck game where she had the £50k and NINE blues at 10-box!! At the end of the game, her husband payed £50 so Danielle could have a holiday!! I remember the forum crashing after this game and this was also the £50's third of an extraordinary FIVE consecutive appearances on the table!

9 years ago, Claire went all the way, swapped her box and won £35,000

11 years ago, another £35k box win happened in the form of Chantelle, who was one of the most opinion-splitting players ever!

12 years ago, Candice bizarrely dealt at £19k with the £20k/£75k/£100k still higher at 5-box having turned down £32k a round earlier! Her show was the first to ever feature the hypothetical SWAP at 2-box, and Candice really had £75,000 but the hypo-swap was done to make it look like she had £500 on the table

I mentioned this before, but I reckon a lot of people forget just how early this first hypo-swap was, the absolute golden age for the show in what was probably the most viewed week of them all (the audience record of 4.66 million fell on the Saturday with Marcus). 'Controversial' swaps are more associated with the second season with the likes of PJ and Barbara.

Oh i also forgot to mention Kristi's game 8 years ago where her game had a twist where Kristi would predict the banker's offers and if she was correct, the banker would increase the offer or something?? Who would've thought that the offer prediction thing would become permanent some years later!

I still remember Kristi quite well and i can't say she was favourite contestant, as she seemed quite moody and cocky at times throughout her game. She acted as if she was so sure she would get the prediction right and then made faces as if she was constipated whenever she got them wrong!

It's an interesting comment you make psycho about the swap, particularly the hypo-swap - one of the most profound things I took from re-watching most of season 1 (as many as James Booker could find and upload to the Tube of Yous, anyway) was that the swap was generally, in its first few stagings, perceived as a joke. Rather than the straightforward choice between two boxes that it became, at first the players saw it as the banker taking the mickey, trying to goad them and play pointless mind games by offering a seventh decision in a game they'd been promised would need only six from them at most.

Irene, I think, laughed, and took up the swap because of the sheer novelty of it; herself and Noel eventually worked out a way that they'd go about the process itself, which entailed both walking over to the other contestant, Noel giving them Irene's box and Irene taking back the new box.
Nick, in the next show, interpreted it as a comic prop, set up to mirror the tragicomedy that his game had been ('What is it, forty?' 'No, £30' 'Oh, see, I'd have taken it at £40...'). It hadn't worked for Irene, so he might as well try his hand; didn't work for him either.

The swap was first offered to Oli, though, quite early on; with £5,000 and £15,000 left, Noel put down the phone laughing ('he-he-he...you're not a very nice man!') and said to Oli, 'we haven't had this happen before; do you know what the offer is? The offer is, you can swap the box if you wish!'. This was met with disbelief, a lot of muttering from various anonymous people and a generally...stunned...atmosphere. 'I would never swap!', said Oli, to much delight and rapturous applause. He didn't swap, and he won the £5,000, which was about right for a guy who came across incredibly badly throughout his game. Seriously, his only redeeming quality was that he was an exact replica of a twenty-something Jim Carrey.

Anyway, so the swap itself didn't carry any gravitas until some point in February of 2006, from my recollection, when for whatever reason, players began considering it as a serious option that may reap rewards. Interestingly, the first swap that really paid dividends, I'd say, was Valerie's in October 2006 (10p for £10,000); there were a few who swapped low blues for honorary blues, and Khanny got himself out of jail by giving away a fiver for £5,000, but we hadn't witnessed a really life-changing swap until Valerie, whose game I have no recollection of whatsoever.

The hypo swap wasn't treated with nearly as much ado in Candice's game - I've just watched the ending to re-familiarise myself, and it was more about the other box being her lucky number, and how she would've swapped if it was offered, and she pretty much invited the banker to offer it anyway; he did, she did, and I suppose if you take a post-modern view of Deal or No Deal, she ended up beating him in a roundabout kind of way.

There ends the lecture.

I think Connell's was the first time someone swapped away a large-ish amount for pocket change but £5k Matt was the first time a swap went dramatically wrong, and was outdid by £1k Barbara a couple of weeks later!

I still don't know which was worse out of £1k Barbara and (Miss) Orry who swapped away a £100k box for £1, as (s)he still got a £1k bonus because of the Christmas twist. I suppose Barbara's was worse in a way because she turned down some crap offers, in a game where many of us would've won £100,000, then the decision to swap the box literally came out of the blue at the last second and when cost of her mistake had become known, Barbara was so overcome with shock she was near tears and could barely get the words out of her mouth. (Miss) Orry's was heart-wrenching, and could've easily been avoided, but unlike Barbara's decision to swap which was seemed like a sudden rush of blood to the head, Orry was extremely sentimental and we all kind of knew (s)he was going to swap at the end (it was definitely sentiment rather than greed that drove Orry to the end. Around this time was the beginning of melodramatic sob-story era)

Anyway, happy 12 years since MAD SARAH's game. Happy 9 years since £250k ALICE and Happy 11 years since Patrick dealt at £50,000, but the reaction in the studio was as if the world just ended when he undersold a £250k box!!

Yes, Patrick was quite poignant, actually; he said ruefully, 'you know, thirty-odd years ago, I might have gone for it...'

Ignoring the box contents, Patrick played a very great game. He took several large but calculated risks turning down his 3rd and 4th offers, and even treated the Banker's intense mind games at 8 box (raising the offer £30,001 and a picture of Julian would crashed from that amount to £1k on a similar bit significantly weaker 8 box) with the disapproval and ignorance it deversed. He then got rewarded with an extremely generous 5 box offer that was over £10,000 above the Fair Deal (in another era that configuration would draw an offer of £35,000 max!) which without hindsight only a risk oblivious player would decline with a 50/50 chance of the final offer being a lot less and only a 20% chance of final offer being significantly more.

If Patrick's game took place in most periods between mid-2008 onwards, the Banker wouldn't need to remind Patrick of previous games as the wings would do it for him, and he'd probably get someone with Patrick's circumstances out for roughly £20,000 at 8 box. So while early 2007 was tainted by the blue chants and Noel's wakeyist attitude, it still produced a LOT of games that would've been warmly welcomed stand-outs in nearly any other era.

So it's been a whole decade since Reverend David and the empty box moment, Matty's self-inflicted (but still painful to watch) 1p win, Gemma's underrated £35k win at Easter, and some of the worst banker behaviour ever displayed in Alex's game, where the banker virtually brainwashed Alex into dealing early by guaranteeing a forcing offer if he lost a big number and then punished him with stupidly inflated proveout offers We had the likes of Peter Law, Derek Brown, Simmo, Empty box Kirsty (though she did pretty much NOTHING besides that moment), Big Ron and Eunice all on the wings

After the first two months of 2008 which were pretty middle of the road, this was when things really started to deteriorate for the show. With the plague of bad luck, tears and cautious/shell-shocked contestants dealing early missing out on huge wins really starting to take hold around this time

Two different attitudes to the game...

*box is opened, empty; Noel walks around confused*
David: AN ACT OF GOD!

*Noel opens Matty's box, revealing 1p*
Matty: [mutters] I feel sick.

I watched Eunice's game a few months ago on Yew Toob. She was a character and a half, wouldn't surprise me if she's still going now.

Derek, yeah, when I saw his game for the first time (also a few months ago, after many years of people on here harking back to it) it was entitled 'unluckiest game ever'. After the first few rounds, I thought, 'hold on, what's all that about? He's not been unlucky at all so far!'
The key there being, 'so far'...but, hey, he took it well.

The atmosphere at the end of Matty's game was extraordinary, almost unprecedented at the time. i think it was the first time since 1p Trevor where the atmosphere was totally dead at the end, with the eerie silence in the studio, Matty's wife in tears and Matty looking as if he was about to hang himself after the game collapsed.

It was so bad that when Matty no-dealt the final offer of 11p, there wasn't even the usual 'polite applause' like there was when Trevor, near tears and barely able to speak, no dealt his final offer, it was just complete silenece. i'd never seen the atmosphere so dead before!

Derek Brown's game was, of course, completely usurped by Nikki a few months later, which saw it pale into comparison despite being a hallmark trainwreck at the time. An entire hall of fame wing was to be set aside for his game alone. Nowadays, especially in the wake of the international monstrosity that was Mark de Souza's 2012 game, it doesn't look all *that* unlucky. I do recall that it was notable at the time for producing the first blue 'squashdown', which feels rather late for such a relatively easy achievement.

Matty, well, he may well have looked like he was in the process of buying the farm, but he appeared all chipper in the '1p club' audience during the Banker's birthday week not long after... maybe about three weeks or so in recording time.

Christ, commenting on decade old game shows at this time.

I remember the ending, it was just silent and painful. I don't know whether to feel sorry for him or to say he was arrogant.

So, things like the Beijing Olympics, the jolly credit crunch starting to set in, Facebook overtaking MySpace as the most popular social media platform (subsequently resulting in MySpace's sharp descent into obscurity), Thumbs-down votes being displayed with YouTube comments and how offended you felt when you saw your comments get thumbs-down votes, were all an entire decade ago?? I still consider 2006/2007 to be 10 years ago, rather than 2008

Let's fast-forward a year to 2009, when things were not quite the show's heyday of 2006, but still far more positive than 2008 (and luckier for that matter!). Around this time in 09, we had 97 year old Joe (unlikely he's still around though ), Lovely Lisa play the 1000th show and won £50k but missed out on the £250k, the 1000th show celebrations where the £1,000 was replaced by a large cash prize and the first of only 2 all-blue 8-boxes which shocking went over everyone head at the time!!