"I'm sorry Matty, we have to complete the game. You have two boxes that you must open."

Box 18 with Angela - £50

Box 5 with Gary - £100

"I'm so sorry darling, I gave it away."

"Well, let's keep you out of the 1p club, eh?"

"I feel sick."

The offer is 11p, and the Banker sends the money tree and tissues back through!

"He obviously feels you are more in need of them."

"I feel sick."

And possibly the most subdued "NO DEAL" of all time.

"£35,000, and I've just blown that."

"OK, here's what you brought to the table because you took the swap. You hoped this was going to be your lucky box; actually, it contains 1p."

Subdued groans, then silence.

"Matty, I'm sure your mind's in turmoil at the moment. You're the 16th member of the 1p club. Maybe one day, when you're having a drink with your mates, you'll be able to laugh about the fact that you're in the Hall of Fame for the biggest crash we've ever had."

Box 6 with Olga contains the 50p.

"You've had the game from Hell, you didn't deserve it, we all feel the pain you're going through, but you'll bounce back from it Matty, because you're a strong guy."

And that concludes another game that I've just seen all the way through for the first time, mainly because I wanted to see if I found Matty unsympathetic.

Well, in all honesty, no, I didn't. I can certainly understand why others would have, due to the bravado he displayed early in the show, but I honestly think that was just playing to the camera. He wasn't the first to do that, and he certainly wouldn't be the last. Nor the last to crash and burn like that.

I also don't think he regretted the swap that much, as it clearly what he wanted to do. I honestly think he regretted turning down the third offer more. KP said at the time that, had either of those second or third offers come at 8-box, he'd have taken it, and I find it hard to disagree.

A highly memorable game for all the wrong reasons. It says a lot about how iconic this and Rev David's game a couple of days later are that Matt and Gemma's big wins from earlier in the month are hardly remember these days. I do hope Matty recovered from this game though, and I have no doubt, this many years later, that indeed he has.

That's all for today then. On Wednesday, I'll be delving into my own personal recordings archive for the first time. Until then, sayonara!

The contemporary post-game comments revealed that Matty was going to donate most, if not *all*, of the winnings to the Tsunami fund. He'd flown out to the region personally and was emotionally committed to the cause. This provides a full context for his abject despair. Sounds like C4 bottled it, not stomaching to air an episode where a man's very noble ambitions were destroyed in a 'gimmick' game and edited out all references to the tsunami fund. Too much was made of his ''money tree'' comment, it was clearly just his personal tone setting introduction to his show, immaterial really. 100's of players have made similar 'provocative' comments that went without note because they won about £6,000.

Don't think much has changed here, Matty would still make it onto the show in 2020 and I half reckon his charitable ambitions would still be edited out so we could 'laugh' at the cocky Cockney crashing through the floor.

Yeah, I read that; would certainly explain why this was so much more depressing than similar trainwrecks before and afterwards. I also read somewhere that Matty quit his job so he could go on the show, which makes sense given his throwaway comment about "have to get another job" after the crash.

I also think the show maybe suffers from being viewed in isolation, rather than in context following on from Matty's weeks on the wings beforehand, where apparently he was a prominent and popular figure and did the trails for the Easter shows. I remember James1978 saying that he found John G's crash a lot sadder after watching it after his time on the wings, where he came across well and provided good advice and encouragement to the others.