After nearly a decade, applications opened this year for, this time fronted by .
The popular daytime gameshow originally ran for 11 years on before , reportedly over dwindling ratings.
Based on a Dutch format, the iconic programme gives contestants the chance to select one of 22 boxes, with each one containing an unknown cash amount ranging from 1p to £250,000.
Without knowing what each one contains, the player must eliminate the boxes, which are opened one at a time, and the amount of money inside is revealed.
Once the amount is revealed, players can choose to gamble in a bid to select a box with more cash or accept an offer from the show’s banker, whose offers grow higher if the larger cash prizes remain unchosen.
As contestants know all too well, that can all change in an instant if a big cash prize is unveiled.
appeared on Deal or No Deal in 2012 when she was 21 years old, and became the fifth UK winner to leave with the jackpot of £250,000.
Now a 32-year-old business-owner running her own independent personal travel consultancy company, Nong has recalled the ‘life-changing’ experience, and told us what it was really like to be ‘sat in that chair’.
She said: ‘Honestly, it was one of the best experiences of my life. I’ll always remember it, behind the scenes and in front of the camera, the crew, all the people involved. I met some amazing people, and of course Noel Edmonds, the audience, everything. It was just amazing.’
Metro.co.uk also spoke to , who was the first woman to win just 1p on the show when she took part in the game in 2009.
‘The whole experience was really cultish’
Now a published author, Sally, 46, told us: ‘It was a total mixed bag. There were highs and lows. It was tiring, exciting, anxiety-making. It was everything all encapsulated in one experience and I didn’t expect it to be like that. I came away from it feeling quite bruised by it, if I’m honest.’
Talking about her motivations for going on the show, she shared: ‘I went on it because I needed the money. I was broke, and I thought, “Wouldn’t this be great to help me out in a place of having just lost my flat and things going wrong, wouldn’t it be a positive experience?” Then it not turning out to be a positive experience, I came away feeling very… I hadn’t won any money at all, and I slightly blamed myself for pushing myself too hard and not taking the money when I should have done.’
She continued: ‘I think it’s really easy watching it for people to go, “Why didn’t you take the money? I would have taken that,” and the thing is, that’s not how the game is set out. The game is there for you to gamble, it encourages you to have another go and push on further. There’s a weird woo-woo expectation that good people win money, so when you don’t win anything it’s really weird. It’s weird because, [you question] “Am I not a good enough person?” because that’s the rhetoric that’s going on.’
She added: ‘Being on the show, I thought it was going to be lots of good fun, and it was in loads of ways. The people were really great, and I had fun, it was just a bit weird. A bit cultish. The whole experience was really cultish.’
Opening up on what she meant by ‘cultish’, Sally continued: ‘It was around, “What do you feel in the boxes?” There was a sense that somehow you were part of an experience which was more spiritual than it was practical, which is kind of not me. When you’re in the bubble, you’re in the hotel together, you’re on the game together, you’re in each other’s pockets for what can be weeks, people are coming in and you’re with them on that emotional journey.
‘It’s really full-on. It’s really, really intense. It’s very different now, because with reality TV there’s more psychological support and there wasn’t at that time. I think that was maybe a mistake, but then there’s also [this idea] that you come into it with nothing so if you go home with nothing that’s okay, [but] actually some people are going for a reason.’
After winning only 1p, Sally admitted that she ‘went back to the changing room and sobbed my heart out’. When asked if there was support from the crew on set, she explained: ‘No, but there was no anticipation that there would be. It wasn’t available so you didn’t think that it would be on offer, so you didn’t even think about it.
‘I remember after getting the 1p and going “Yay, I’ve got the 1p isn’t that great,” I went back to the changing room and sobbed my heart out. I just sobbed and sobbed. I felt shame, I felt that I’d been greedy, I felt really bad about myself, properly bad, and that really surprised me, and then I worried about it going out on telly and what people would think about me.’
When Sally watched the episode with her gran, she revealed she was ‘sobbing from behind a pillow’, but remains grateful that there was no social media at the time.
‘Social media wasn’t around so we weren’t subjected to the ridicule and banter that happens online now. It was just based in forums, and I didn’t join the forums. I didn’t read them until much, much later on when I’d gotten over it, just to protect myself really.’
‘There’s an unwritten rule to keep your chat with the banker a secret’
Recalling her experience during filming, Sally said: ‘The weirdest thing was talking to the banker. I cried my heart out at the end. He said something really nice, something about how anything I did in the future, I would be successful, and it made such a difference to me in that moment, because I was… even now thinking about it makes me [emotional].’
She added: ‘I think there was an unwritten rule that we didn’t say what he said, and also because once you won, you go out for drinks and you go home, there’s no great unpacking of what happened in the moment.
‘Most of the time it was, is there somebody really there?’
She added that the whole idea of the banker ‘was a weird thing as well’. ‘You know, this unknown entity that no one knew who it was, they had your life in their hands, it was really weird.’
Nong also added that the banker was ‘really mysterious.’ She said: ‘I still have no idea who the banker is, what he sounds like… I think that’s part of the fun because no one actually knows.’
‘Filming took place over an eight-hour day in which we’d film two or three games’
Nong admitted that the period during filming was far more intense than it may seem on screen, with the contestants spending full days on set and getting through two or three games each day.
She explained: ‘It was a full-on day. It was an early start, I think you have to be on set for 8 o’clock, but you know you’ll have breakfast and everything. They really do look after you.
‘You go there, you have all of the outfits that you want to bring and everyone sorts all of that out for you, hair and make-up, just touch up and stuff like that.
‘Like some shows, it depends how the game goes. Some individuals might have a quicker game than usual because it depends how they play the game and how it turns out. Some of them are really long.
‘It really does depend, because this is life-changing money for all of us. You can probably film maybe two or three in a day, so it was a long day.’
Sally similarly told us that during her stint filming, she was there for two weeks, also filming three games a day.
She said: ‘I think I was there for two weeks, and you do three shows a day. You stay in the hotel together, you get on a bus, you go to the studio, and you’re there for the day, then you get on the bus and go back.’
‘The evenings were full of partying, it was like being a student in freshers’ week’
‘During the evening, the winners of the day, you’d go drinking with them,’ Sally shared.
‘It’s very, very party, and that’s not really me anyway. So when you got into a cycle of celebrating, drinking, sleeping, up, it’s quite institutional and it’s a bit weird.
‘Sometimes we all hung out in the bar and if people wanted to go out later they would, but the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly, because you’re spending money you haven’t won, and when you’re broke you think err… and it definitely suited people who were party people and enjoyed that. I didn’t enjoy it so much.’
‘It was, you know when you feel like you’re an outsider in the group? You’re not having a shared experience,’ she added, comparing it to ‘being a student in freshers’.
‘There was a mole in the group who would reveal contestants’ gossip’
Nong also spoke to us about parties and karaoke after filming, saying that contestants would spend the evenings ‘hanging out and getting to know each other’.
While she confirmed that she had a ‘great time’, she added: ‘But the next day I don’t know who it was but somehow [the crew] found out what was spoken about or things like that.
‘And it’s like, “Who’s the mole? Who knows all of this stuff?” I couldn’t remember what it was because we went out one night for a karaoke, and I don’t know… it might have been just a conversation the next day, I have no idea, but they find out all the gossip and stuff.’
‘I didn’t get the money straight away’
Despite the huge win during filming, Nong revealed that she didn’t receive the money straight away and had to sign something ‘kind of like an NDA’ to ensure that she wouldn’t ‘say anything’ and spoil the show.
‘You don’t get the money straight away,’ she explained. ‘I wasn’t sure when I was going to get the money. It was roughly “you’ll get the money in a couple of months’ time”.
‘I think I was told it’s going to air in August. I had my money before, but obviously couldn’t say anything. It just got transferred to my bank account.’
Talking about the moment the money came in, she added it was ‘a bit surreal’.
She said: ‘I don’t think it sinks in, I think it started sinking in when I had a call from my bank 24 hours before it got transferred.
‘Then when it came into my bank account, I remember I print-screened it because I [thought] I was never going to have that amount of money in my bank account again.’
Nong, who used the money to help her buy a house as well as gifted her mum with a car, continued: ‘That’s when I thought, “Oh my gosh, I can actually go and view houses and this is just crazy.” It was really surreal.’
‘There was a sense of separation between us and Noel Edmonds’
Noel, who hosted Deal or No Deal from 2005 to 2016, was labelled ‘lovely’ by both contestants.
Nong shared: ‘He made you feel at ease, because when you’re there it’s quite daunting. Eyes are on you and you’ve got to focus and play the game, but also have fun. That’s your moment.
‘There’s so much emotion. He’s so clever, he knows how to make it funny. He knows how to be good with people and when I played my game, honestly I was an emotional wreck, but he really does work for you. He wants everyone to do well – he genuinely cares. I thought that was so lovely.’
Sally added: ‘The only time we saw him was on set and he was lovely. There was that weird distance between the contestants and him. I think that was on purpose so there was a sense of separation, so we could be us as contestants doing our thing rather than having a relationship with Noel. He genuinely was really nice.’
‘I got to keep the box as a lifetime souvenir’
‘I got to keep the box!’ Nong revealed. ‘I’ve still got the box, that was my lifetime souvenir.’
Meanwhile, Sally was also gifted with a souvenir. She told us: ‘Noel came in and said, “Is everything okay?” and when I asked him for the inside of the box which had the 1p on, he said “Yeah.”
‘He ripped it out, and said, “I know I shouldn’t be doing this”, and he gave me the inside with the penny on.
‘I got to keep it, he signed it too!’
Not only that, but she’s also kept the 1p cheque, telling us: ‘I still have it! I half-planned to turn it, this 1p, into something amazing, like when you’re given a paperclip and have got to go and exchange it for bigger and bigger things. I thought I’d turn this into £1million… and of course, life gets in the way and it didn’t happen.’
She continued: ‘There was a form of notoriety and specialness that comes with being a bit rubbish on a show like that, being the first woman to win 1p. Life doesn’t always turn out how you want it to be, but you need to be resilient to things being a bit [rubbish] sometimes, and that’s okay.
‘So if you can lose thousands of pounds on a TV show and walk away with a penny, then actually is that a disaster? Not really. It will be okay, and it has been.’
‘I got the call to be on the show two years after auditioning, and it was the most shocking moment of my life’
Nong applied to be on the programme when she was 19 years old, and had ‘no idea’ about the show aside from what she had seen on adverts.
‘I applied for it, then I got a call to say, you’ve got an audition and to go to Bristol, and I thought, “Oh my god, that’s amazing.” We had to go to a hotel and we went all day for an audition process, which was daunting. It was like, if you go through to the next stages you get a bronze ticket, a silver ticket, and then a golden ticket means you’re on the show.’
Talking about the audition process, she remembered being filmed and being asked questions so that the producers could get to know her, such as why she wanted to apply and what she would do with the money.
‘I got through all the way to the end and they said, “If you get through this, you get the golden ticket, you’ll be on the show, and we’ll message you or call you if you get through”. I didn’t hear anything. So after a month, I had just forgotten about it and moved on in my life. Then fast-forward two years later, I got a call. That was the most shocking call of my life.’
At the time, she’d just started her ‘first proper job’, and was asked to take time off for filming. Nong told us: ‘Not long after I got the call, I started my first proper job as a pricing analyst for a fuel company, and then I got the call and they wanted me to take two weeks off. I hadn’t even passed my probation. I had to do it, it was once-in-a-lifetime. I had to really convince my boss and they let me, which was amazing.’
Sally was approached to be on Deal or No Deal after appearing on Ready, Steady, Cook with her mum. Not long later, the mother-daughter duo went on an adventure rowing the Atlantic Ocean from East to West, which Sally later wrote a book on.
Recalling going on the show, Sally said: ‘I think we ended up on a list of contributors who might be interested, and I got an email through saying, “There’s going to be a new show, do you want to take part?”
‘It hadn’t been filmed and we hadn’t seen it, so I didn’t know what it was. I went to my mum and said, “No I am not going to do it, I’m not going to go on, because I would just take the money. If they offered me £1,000 I’d go yes it’s fine and take it.” But then I thought, I’ll go and see what happens.
‘I went along to the audition with hundreds of people – it was all very smiley, you do bits for the camera, and I didn’t think it was going to happen. I thought, well I’m at a loose end and I need the money, so I’ll go for it. So that’s what I did. It was already airing, so I was brought in a little into the process, but it hadn’t aired when I auditioned.’
‘It’s not scripted, and we were never asked to re-film moments’
Both Nong and Sally insisted that the show wasn’t scripted, and they never refilmed any moments.
Nong said: ‘It just worked out how it worked out. Every day no one knows who’s going to be next and we’ll predict it’s going to be whoever.
‘When you film, you literally have this bag and there’s loads of balls – it’s a bit like a lottery – and you have to pick out a ball. No one’s seen the boxes, no one knows what’s inside it because you’ve got the adjudicator, and that’s your number once you’re picked.
‘I got picked, I was asked, “Can you just pick a ball from this bag?” I didn’t know what was inside it, I just picked a ball and that was going to be my box in front of me.’
Sally added that during her time on the show they didn’t re-film any moments, but she did recall filming ‘stopping a couple of times’ for things like make-up touch-ups.
‘It wasn’t scripted, the only thing I had was my list of numbers,’ she said.
Recalling one instance where filming was paused, she said: ‘I do remember the poor make-up girl, because I hot-flush when I get anxious, and I was hot-flushing really badly, and she said, “We’re just going to stop there with technical issues.” It wasn’t technical issues – it was dragging me off so the poor make-up girl could cover me with powder to stop me looking so red. I felt so uncomfortable, it was awful!’
Metro.co.uk has approached Channel 4 for comment.
Deal or No Deal returns to ITV later this year.
