I am just curious if a particular player who is well-liked (or popular) with respect to the other players leads to more appearances before his/her turn on the Crazy Chair.

No, I don't think this is really the case.

Aaron, another statistician players often turned to for advice, played on his 19th show for example.

Khanny was on for what seemed like forever, but he was really quiet on the wings (but noticable for his shirts!), although his game was a different matter!

Most other long runners were great characters, I have to say!

You have to remember that most players are on for about 18 - 26 shows, so only really anything above 26 or below 18 can be considered unusual.

I'm not entirely sure how they choose which players will do 20 shows, and which will do 25, for example, but I do know that some players have played early due to work commitments (Garavan only doing 9 shows, for example).

Some of the show counts have also been messed up due to players being ill - for example, technicall, Raj, sarah and Ashley actually didn'tdo 33 shows on the wings technically, as they were off for some of them.

The main example of where a player is popular and has had a large amount of shows is Pat M - who played after doing 32 shows on the wings.

I don't think it works the other way round, either, I don't think the players who have not been so popular have done lower amounts of shows.

It is also down to the editing of the programme by Endemol as to whether a player is shown as "popular" or not, and it is often the case that a player on the wings gets more and more air-time nearer and nearer their game.

Mmm, I found that odd too - same with people like Howard and Cocky Bill, who did just 16 and 14 shows respectively, despite being built up as big characters on the wings. Then you have people like Norma, Khanny and Yvonne, who were there for 29-30 shows despite never really saying much. I think generally it is the case that the more popular characters stay for longer, but there are always exceptions to that, and I have no idea what the reason is - or even if there is a reason!

Perhaps it's to put us off the scent, so we can't accuse them of making the popular players stay longer!

I doubt we will ever know how the contestant selection process works, and sure the contestants and maybe even Noel don't know - it's obviously not truly random, even if you were to exclude those with a very low show count from the "randomiser", but neither does it follow any obvious pattern.

Sometimes you get spells where they pick the longest runner nearly every day, other times they keep picking early ones and leaving others there for ages. I suspect there is perhaps a random element in there, giving higher probability to those who have been there longest, but that the producers will often tweak it a bit if there's people they want to give a long run to, or that have particular circumstances that favour a long or short run or game on a particular day. There have been rumours one or two were picked early because they didn't really fit in, but that's obviously not true of the majority who play early.

Noel does know who is playing in advance.

Yes he knows which name is going to come up on the board at the start of each game as he has his cue card ready, but does he have any idea how they select them?

*coughLucycough*

Wasn't that because she lived in Bristol, and was able to do 50 shows? Yes, she was popular, but I think it was more that she didn't have to travel far to get home. She now works at Endemol, so she must've done something right!

The theory isn't totally consistent, but there is definitely something in it!