Game shows are the first salvo in the 2024 TV ratings battle

Tipping Point ★★★ and Deal or No Deal ★★½

The fact that Deal or No Deal ever became a mega-hit game show franchise across the world is a testament to either the genius of the format creators or to the general public’s surprisingly low threshold for excitement. Game shows exist on a spectrum: at one end are the super-brainy exercises like Pointless and Only Connect, in which victory comes only to those whose quizzing skills are sharpened to a fine point. At the other end is Deal or No Deal, which requires basically no skill beyond the ability to say numbers out loud.

Grant Denyer hosts Ten’s new version of the game show Deal or No Deal.

Deal or No Deal is, essentially, just a guessing game. You could argue that it is a tense and gripping examination of contestants’ ability to realistically make assessments of probability under pressure – there are probably loads of mathematics PhDs who did their thesis on it. But let’s be honest: it’s a guessing game. It’s pretty much Old Maid without the need to remember anything.

That’s why you need the gold and you need the overwrought music and you need the relentless hyperbole so that you can fill half an hour and trick the audience into thinking they’re watching someone doing something impressive. If we realised that we just saw someone get thousands of dollars for nothing, we’d be furious.

But more than that, you need a host who can sell it and Channel Ten’s revival of the format has started on the right foot by bringing in Grant Denyer, the past master of spinning gold from straw. His irrepressible energy has for many years now been making TV much more fun than it should be, and Deal or No Deal is his greatest challenge. He rises to it manfully, bouncing and grinning and bantering and congratulating ordinary Australians on their encounters with random chance like P.T. Barnum enticing punters to see the Fiji mermaid. Denyer’s talent for game-show alchemy means that Deal or No Deal, which should by all rights be a painfully tedious slog, becomes … well … kind of OK. Grant is just so into it that when one of the case-holders says, “I think I’ve got the 75,000 in my case”, you can go up to 10 seconds before laughing at how ridiculous this is.

Former tennis champ Todd Woodbridge had added hosting Tipping Point Australia to his burgeoning TV portfolio.

But the new Deal is not the only game in town when it comes to pre-dinner game show viewing. Seven has The Chase, and now Nine has come to the party with Tipping Point Australia, the local adaptation of the long-running UK show hosted by Ben Shephard. Tipping Point, like Deal, deals substantially in luck: money is won by dropping tokens into an arcade-style coin-pusher machine; if your token falls in the right spot and the coins drop for you, your bank will grow. However, there is also a genuine quiz element: to get more chances to play on the machine, contestants must compete against each other on trivia questions. This tests the players sorely, but the show cuts them a little slack by making the questions extremely easy. It’s still a lot harder than Deal or No Deal, though, in that it requires something more than the power of speech to win.

However, while Ten has gone for a proven pro in Denyer, Nine has taken more of a punt, going for former tennis champion Todd Woodbridge to oversee Tipping Point. Woodbridge is not known for his facility with quiz shows, nor anything really that doesn’t involve furry balls. Fortunately, his show doesn’t require the kind of dragging-out-the-run-time sorcery that Denyer does so well, but there is still a certain level of charisma you like to see and Woodbridge’s ability to ask about contestants’ lives and seem genuinely interested is, if we’re honest, somewhat in question. On the other hand, he’s got nice hair and a lovely smile and many hosts have forged successful careers with less. He also has the advantage of working with a format that combines the cruelty of randomness with the joy of yelling at the screen when contestants give idiotic answers.

In the end, both Tipping Point and Deal or No Deal offer undemanding late afternoon silliness to relax in front of. Which you prefer will very much depend on whether you rank the skills of a hype man more highly than the intelligence of a format.

Tipping Point is on Nine, weekdays, 5pm: Deal or No Deal is on Ten, weekdays, 6pm.

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