Come on then...arguably one of the biggest characters on this forum, you either love him or you hate him...at very least you love to see what he has to say on Noel's daily behaviour...our resident analyst!

The contestant applications are currently open...but would you want to see him actually appear on the show?!

I for one would love to see him on there...his whole "every board has a buy-out price...he (The Banker) just needs to offer it to me for me to take it" theory, forever dreaded by the gamblers out there, intrigued by the statisticians, and even a former contestant always loved his theories, whether they be too OTT or too detailed

Come on then guys - let's have a good bash at this!

Everyone who votes, please give reasons why

Absolutely definitely, if nothing else to see how the banker would react to him - I doubt he'd know what to do!

Definitely, the game would be very interesting to watch

Without a shadow of a doubt, yes. He reads a bit too far into things at times, but it'd be good to have a statistician on the wings, and I'd love to see how Noel and the banker react to him considering that he slags them off all the time.

They'd probably not cast him because of his criticisms of pro-gambling, mind you, though he's criticised poor deals in the past as well (in 1k Michael's game he said that if he was the host he'd have guilt tripped him as well!)

I wouldn't go as far as saying he slags them off...just extreme constructive criticism

Come on then, who's got the bottle to admit to voting "No"?

Want to know why, considering that's so far the only "No" vote

Loving the margin here - anyone else got any reasons? Some of you have voted and not said

I would love to see you struggling to contain yourself and rolling your eyes every time Noel opened his mouth.

I haven't voted but can we have a third option "can get on the show but the producers won't allow him".

Well let's be fair, H criticised Noel several times and they let him on

But yes, his reputation for slandering Endemol would raise eyebrows as to why he'd apply...I guess it'll ultimately come down to whether or not they believe him to only slander because he is yet to see an unedited version which would undoubtedly remove the "production team favouring gambling" theory he's believed for so long...

...he was so close to witnessing it while H was on, but he didn't get to stay sadly...wish he did for THAT reason alone!

The difference is that my 'criticism' was light-hearted and done in jest...

I'd like to see KP play because I don't think he'd be too predictable, but very sound in analysing the board and making the right decision.

Now that, I would love to be in the audience to see that game

I really do believe that I have made my comments in light of the edit, or in many more recent cases even the recap of the edit on here - that's an entirely incomplete perspective, and it was a big shame that the only time I visited the Dream Factory I had to leave without seeing a box being opened.

I make no apologies for emphasising the edit - it's what the typical viewer sees and it's that which s/he can take hints from. And I make no apologies for commenting upon gambling in the light of this story of 9% of the British population gambling in the hope of avoiding debt (!) - gambling is a serious social issue and I am highly concerned about anything which might encourage vulnerable people (and DoND's daytime slot means its audience skews heavily towards such groups - the unemployed, students and children - and away from those with steady incomes).

In terms of contestant free will, I really don't think that's overridden much if at all, and even if it was I doubt more than a handful of contestants in the show's long history have ever been influenced. In turn, all of those are probably pushovers in life and unworthy of the life-changing opportunity the show provides them. You need strong wills and strong characters on this show, and that doesn't have to be correlated with a certain (i.e. low) level of risk-aversion. Look at Beryl - one of the feistiest and most strong-willed contestants I can recall, and right up with the most cautious. Certainly, in another era, she'd have been the first to deal at the second offer if not sooner, because she wouldn't have let anyone tell her not to! But was she a bad contestant? No, she was great fun on the wings and entertaining in the chair too.

Which I believe I would be, not to mention useful to other contestants, and it's great to see that 87% of you have supported the application that I am sending out next week.

I know I should be surprised by that article, but somehow I'm not.

With unemployed people I can see where you're coming from (since they're probably a bit desperate for money in most cases), but as for students, surely if someone is smart enough to get into uni in the first place, they'd be smart enough not to be influenced by implicit pressure to gamble from a daytime TV show? As for children, they'd either be too young to really understand how the show works (when I started watching in early 2006 it took me a few games to realise how it was supposed to work), or if they do understand they probably wouldn't pick up on the pro-gambling side (it's really not as explicit as we sometimes make it out to be...)




Beryl always seems to be the first person that's mentioned when referring to someone cautious, but I reckon that there have been more cautious contestants than her in the past. 1k Ann, 1k Michael, 3k David spring to mind off the top of my head, and there are probably quite a few more.

And I thought you didn't like overly cautious players. In fact, in the three games I just mentioned, here were your replies.

Ann's game:




Michael's game:




David's game:




Yet you had no problem with Beryl's decision, which in many ways was comparable to Michael's because there was only one power 5 left, and in Michael's case he had no back-ups whatsoever, whereas in Beryl's case she still had 15k, 3k and 1k as red back-ups...

Oh Beryl's decision was desperately poor, but I think I was relatively mellow about it at the time. I think it helped that it was coming from a long way out - it was obvious she would play safe! - and I think also I (and a lot of others) rather liked her as a person, which as many have pointed out made it harder to criticise her. (Good contestant, bad player of the game - the two are not incompatible... someone like Lance from 2008 was a bad player of the game and a bad contestant though!) David was easy to not sympathise with for many who thought he overplayed his personal life, and I can't even remember what Ann and Michael were like.



I think I became more outspoken about gameplay of all types after that, anyway... if Beryl's Deal was repeated now I'd go nuts! Mind you, you'd get ten grand on that board now (and I'd take that).

You're right that students should be smart and not so easily led. Unfortunately, with university students now a majority rather than an elite (whether that's a good thing or not is irrelevant to this discussion), and facing more responsibility than ever, it makes sense to believe some will fail to cope and become rather desperate. Indeed, I was at one of the top universities in the country and knew a lot of people who gambled (usually online poker or sports betting).

I'm not sure whether it's more dangerous to have implicit or explicit pressure. Implicit pressure is less obvious, but will meet far less resistance, and seeing as there's now been over 1,000 hours of DoND, that's plenty of time to plant seeds of influence... you are, of course, right that it is very rarely (if ever) explicit.

Still, I think part of the problem is that I am extremely good at reading through what people say and seeing malevolent purposes. That comes with the territory of being a Politics graduate, and is also coloured by my Psychology studies at sixth form as that gave me the understanding that people really can be quite easily led (if you don't believe me, look at the Milgram experiment).

Above all, I think I have been coloured by what happened before I went to university. I desperately wanted to go, but under implicit pressure from my family not to, I deferred for a year, feeling that I could not let them down. Underestimate the effects of seeking social approval at your peril.