Little wonder that Noel Edmonds sports a perma-grin beneath that beard. Deal or No Deal, the salvation of his TV career, turns 500 episodes old at the end of this month. I’ll leave debating the show’s merit to gair rhydd’s estimable TV desk, but it’s certainly a unique offering – not in the promise of “no questions except one”, but in the assumptions about its audience.
In pitting the contestant against a database of questions, most gameshows take for granted that the guy in the hotseat will know at least some of the answers – and that the audience will too, participating at home, echoing the TV in their thousands. But Deal or No Deal assumes we all know nothing, at least about probability. It’s at best guesswork all the way. But it shouldn’t be.
The game ought to be viewed as a simple risk assessment, balancing the Banker’s offer against the odds of getting a higher offer on the next go – similar, in many respects, to a game of blackjack. It is instead an appalling demonstration of superstition, magical thinking and gambler-fallacies, encouraged by Edmonds invoking lucky numbers and endlessly bringing up boxes’ previous contents as though it actually matters.
Given that Endemol have gained extensive experience of cherry-picking contestants for TV shows after eight series of Big Brother, filtering out numerate applicants from the 80,000 hopefuls can’t have proven too strenuous. Stockbrokers, poker-players and (ahem) astrophysics graduates are undoubtedly conspicuous by their absence. The contestants that have made it onto the show have, by and large, been comprehensively beaten.
If every participant simply took the box that they started the show with, the average prize money would be around £26,000. In fact, the Banker has given away an average of around £16,000 per game. The players’ ill-considered ‘gameplan’ more often than not makes them worse off. By the time the 500th episode airs on June 29, Endemol will effectively be up to the tune of £5m. They’re all-too-literally banking on contestant and audience alike being stupid.
But wait. That audience is us. Or at least, it’s partly us: around a quarter of Deal or No Deal’s four million viewers are at university. An endearing naïvety, blithe ignorance of our own limits, and bizarre tendency to fetishise a certain Argentinian terrorist notwithstanding, students are not stupid. But could Endemol possibly have got that impression from universities themselves?
Some staff members don’t seem to have a very high opinion of us, that much is certain. When one department’s administrator feels the need to fire off an email to a group of PhD students urging them to use the pedestrian crossing when negotiating Park Place, something, clearly, is amiss. My own class of 30 journalism postgrads, average age 23, has been routinely shepherded upstairs to guest lectures, presumed incapable of getting there on time if left to our own devices. Some of us began to wonder if we were going to be lined up two-by-two and instructed to hold hands while they did a quick head-count.
And yet, reflecting on five years in and one year around Cardiff University, it’s clear that these are only extreme examples of a more general malaise. It usually manifests itself as instructions where advice would do. Compulsory tutorials are a case in point, insisting that students meet staff once a week, rather than simply letting them know that if they have a problem or a question they can go to a particular person – still not as bad, of course, as making lectures compulsory, as Oxford proposed last year. Better instead to make us accountable for our own academic performances, though between concerns about league tables and greed for tuition fee-revenue the University is unlikely to risk creating excess dropouts any time soon.
The obligation for students living in halls to register with a Cardiff GP is another instance, the clear implication being that we can’t be trusted to take responsibility for our own health. This has been a mandatory requirement since 1995. Perhaps the residences division foresaw the results of the ‘97 election and the subsequent drive from the Red Team, renowned for believing they know best, to squeeze as many people through university as they possibly can. Or perhaps I’m giving them too much credit – more, at any rate, than they seem willing to give us.
The idea that here, away from parental clutches, we’re treated as adults and free to do basically as we wish is wholly illusory, and fuelled almost entirely by alcohol – if we can get smashed and still be in lectures by 9am we must be pretty free, right? Wrong. And even this has been snatched away from some of our counterparts in Exeter.
Last month their Athletic Union banned drinking-based ‘initiation ceremonies’ for sports teams, setting a £500 fine for anyone found to be breaking the new rules. It’s their typically heavy-handed response to the death of a fresher during a night out last November. Thankfully, Cardiff’s powers-that-be are marginally more restrained. If they reacted thus to every sad-but-preventable death they would have to ban Africa (malaria) and civil engineering (bridge suicides).
This is important not because it’s infuriatingly patronising (though it is) but because if university is supposed to be the chrysalis in which we mutate into grown-ups – rather than the extended sixth form experience that it’s in danger of becoming – then we need to be able to discover our limits, make our own mistakes, and learn from them. A prerequisite for adulthood is autonomy, and it’s lacking in a whole heap of ways that are insignificant on their own – but they add up.
They add up to being a little too accustomed to being told what to do; to being under-equipped for Real Life; to nobody taking students very seriously (ever wondered why NUS-led demos are so readily dismissed these days?); and to a certain TV presenter getting even richer off us. You should by now be left with no questions, except one: what are you going to do about it? christopher.white@gairrhydd.com
