Am I the only one who thinks that DoND feels like it's still trapped in the 2008 recession's shadow (the same feeling that seemed to loom over the show for the entire latter half of it's original Ch4)??

I guess it feels that way because of the reduced top prize and not many large wins happening on the new version, compared to the first couple years of the original run, but it's felt like this since at least 2010, even after 7 years off the air and all the crazy stuff that's happened in the world since 2015

I mean, to an extent, I can see how it would come across that way, definitely!
It's rather demoralising when you see somebody genuinely reeling in shock at being offered such a huge amount of money as £4,400 - the same reaction one might have expected to £44,000 many years ago - before being completely blown away when the banker reaches the heady heights of £10,700. It's plenty, of course it is, it's a nice figure to have in the savings account, but is it really Earth-shattering?
I suppose it's all relative: if you have nothing, then something - whatever it is - really does feel like a fortune. I remember having nothing in the world except myself and my laptop, and can attest to that!

At the same time, I do feel sad in a sense that our general outlook has been so strongly moulded by the recession and the tough, austere years that followed. As a nation, as a society, it feels as if we are frightened to recover, for fear of dropping back again into that void, without being able to realise that we have been there before, so we can go there again and survive if the worst came to the worst.

Anyway, that's slightly off-topic; more on topic, I get the impression that, for many contestants, the higher blues really are significant figures - which appears to influence decision-making in either of two distinct ways. First, a player is faced with an offer in the mid-thousands, and, bowled over, their choice is made in an instant: OH MY GOD, DEAL!
On the other hand, many seem to think, 'well, I can't possibly lose regardless, you're only here once, I may as well give it a shot!'.
That, I feel, is more heavily influenced by the way my generation, in our late twenties and now early thirties, tend to think: 'you can give it your best shot and win, or you can give it your best shot and lose - but if you don't give it a shot, you'll never stand a chance at all, so go for it'.

All of this is to say...yeah, I can see where you're coming from.

Cautious gameplay has always been prevalent in UK Deal or No Deal since the very beginning of it's run imo, it just stood out more once there was less big characters on the wings, which just so happened to coincide with the recession.

And ironically enough the one period of Deal where there was a clear lack of cautious players (early 2007) people on here complained about contestants being too reckless.

There's still scope to win big money in this game because of how insanely generous the banker can get from 5-box onwards, especially at 2-box. But unless you have an outstanding board, to win anything more than a few thousand you do need to play to late into the game.

What's interesting is how, with a few exceptions, most contestants are there more for 'smile money' rather than 'money to change my life'. This is probably just as well when over half the reds are four figures and the lopsided board features a huge jump from 10k to 25k and another huge jump from 25k to 50k.

The only time the show's flaws are really apparent is when the top 4 all disappear early in the game. In 2000s/2010s DOND this still left you with 35k, 20k, 15k to play for. Now if you take out the top 4 the 'equivalents' to play for are 10k, 7.5k, 5k...

And what's even more jarring is when you factor in inflation. Back in 2006, an 'average' DOND win would be 10-15k, which in today' money is equivalent to 17-25k. Nowadays, a typical win is more like 5-10k, so in 'real' terms the prizes are around a third of what we used to see!

I still enjoy the show for what it is, but it isn't going to reach the heights of mid 00s DOND ever again.

You're not alone in feeling that way. The smaller top prize and fewer big wins definitely give the show a sense of being stuck in the post-recession era, even after its revival.

I honestly haven't been following the Mulhern era closely enough to know if the new series has been plagued by "crying games" or contestant needing a certain amount of money to bail them out of any money problems or unenviable personal circumstances a la Brunhilde, Joy or Welsh Toni

MND patient Brad from early in this series is probably the closest I can think of.....

It seems that Season 2 (especially the around Laura era) is now looked at as the true "golden era" of the original DoND, and that's not just because of big money games going off like fireworks, but say what you will about polarising characters from that time like Bunney, he represented a time when everyone just seemed like they were having a great time on the show and not having emotional breakdowns on-set over their life problems or just wanting to win a few grand to pay off some debt they had.....

Everyone used to look up to March 2006 as the golden era of the show, but i think that era is MASSIVELY overrated, and has kind of shrunken on me since going back to watch games from that era and seeing how bad the offers were in a lot of games that month - People would have powerful boards, and yet the banker would drop the offer if they took out the third or fourth highest amount on some games! Look at Fireman Matt's game for example - offers 1 & 2, good offers for the early days, offer 3 however, felt derisory compared to Marie and Brenda who were faced with the same board just weeks earlier (until 2 years later, declining £22,500 with the entire power-5 in tact at 11-box would've been a straight-forward no-deal), and after that, the banker pretty much stopped trying to buy the box despite the sustained strength of the board right up to the end - he even admitted that the 2-box offer was £50 below the peak of the game so that he could claim victory over Matt

Aha! Nice to see this being posted. Cos I be agreein'

It was at its most 'cult-y' and famous, I think the nostalgia derives from that. It was sweeping up awards, celebs were endorsing it, prime time shows were attempted. Our niche fandom exploded into mainstream culture for a brief little moment in the weak winter sun.

The actual games were all a bit mehh, though. Either they weren't that special or the contestants weren't the 'characters' we remember them as. Quite a lot of the games were middle of the road/blue wins. ''Mad'' Sarah would seem downright ordinary and no-nonsense by today's standards. Jim R's game is a genuinely informative PSA on peer pressure. Lucy's personality was that she had stood there for quite a while. A disgraced T*ry MP was on the show that month ffs.

Lucy was easily one of the most overrated contestants in the history of the show. People talk her up as one of the show's "classic big characters" because of her abnormally lengthy run on the wings, but as for being "entertaining"?? 9 times out of 10, she was as bog-basic as humanly possible, spending much of her stint on the show just existing in the background and opening her box like a voice-activated robot being commanded to do so.

Go watch her unceremonious first box opening in Geordie's game, no big build-up, no banter, no good luck speeches, not a word spoken, no emotions shown.....just the standard going through the motions of opening a cardboard box and nothing more. You wouldn't think anything of her from that....

Ah, but the advice she often gave - particularly once she'd settled in - was always sensibility and rationality personified, and usually exactly the voice the player needed to hear in that moment. I think it speaks volumes that, when a player needed a level head whose views they could rely upon to make an informed judgement, they turned to Lucy. Her words crystallised decisions which enriched her friends.

Pretty sure her honest advice was the result of her *not* being too close to a lot of them. I maintain firmly that she spent a lot of her time actually at home in Bristol rather than at the hotel. It's easy to be honest when the stakes aren't high and you're not just gonna tell them what they want to hear. Probably closest with the first crop she winged with (the two lads in the audience for her game) but by the March eps she was commuting.

It may well have been because they weren't so close! But in any event, her advice was honest, it came from her heart, and it was always well-founded - and the result was usually, if a player took it on board, that it benefited them.
I mean, if I only lived a few minutes from the studio, I wouldn't want to stay in a hotel with loads of strangers either! Creature comforts and preferring not to be in overwhelming situations, I suppose, but each to their own!