‘It was nice to welcome him on to a real game show’: Denyer vs Gleeson – the comedy TV feud of 2024
Since returning to the Australian television landscape this year, Ten’s Deal Or No Deal has been a reliable 6pm refuge from the daily carnage of the nightly news bulletins on the other commercial networks.
On Monday night, the Deal is going primetime, with a run of Celebrity Jackpot Specials which will see some of television’s brightest stars play for the chance to score $250,000 for charity.
MasterChef Australia Judges Andy Allen and Sofia Levin, the stars of Gogglebox Australia, Collingwood Premiership captain Darcy Moore, Matildas champion Kyah Simon, and I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! winner Skye Wheatley are all lining up to win the quarter-million.
“Watching people you don’t know win large amounts of money — good Australians — is a really nice thing to see, but watching people you do know having to endure the ups and downs of a game is quite fun because you’re seeing them under serious pressure,” host Grant Denyer tells Mumbrella.
Gold Logie winner Tom Gleeson is first in line to take on the dreaded Banker, and Denyer relished the opportunity to turn the tables on the snarky Hard Quiz host.
“You know when he’s coming on the show you’ve got to coat yourself in Teflon,” Denyer said of Gleeson. “You’ve got to be taking shots. Be ready to take a few back. It was fun having him on, because he doesn’t take anything too seriously.”
Denyer doesn’t hold back when to comes to taking those shots.
“His show Hard Quiz, there’s no stakes because you win a $20 plastic cup at the end of it, right? So all he does is, he gets nerds on to insult them and then sends them out the door with a cheap plastic cup.”
Now, with $250,000 on the line, suddenly Gleeson’s barbs aren’t aren’t as sharp. Denyer said it was fun “watching that penny drop in his mind where he goes, ‘Oh hang on, I’m just used to taking the piss out of everything, now all of a sudden this is for an important cause and it all rests on my shoulders.’
“It was fun torturing him with the responsibility that he had in his hands – but also him wanting to completely hand grenade the show and blow it up because that’s Tom, that’s what he does, right?”
Denyer admits he “took some pot-shots at him” during the filming. “People think that game show hosts all hate one another, so we played on that.” Denyer also had fun pointing out the budgetary gulf between the shiny floor set of prime time Deal, and the humble Hard Quiz set-up.
“It was nice to welcome him on to a real game show with a real budget where people win real things and don’t walk out with their ego destroyed,” Denyer laughs.
The addition of well-known faces to the show allowed for a few format changes. The format has been expanded to an hour — the original running time back in 2003, when it was a weekly show on Seven — with the major prize increased from $100,000 to $250,000, and the addition of more cases to decrease the odds.
“We just gave it more room to breathe,” Denyer explains. “If they’re the faces you know and love and want to hear from, then we needed to create the room to have the fun.
“It was nice to do an expanded version, because you can muck around a lot more, right? It’s fun watching people who are regular commentators on television shows, like the Goggleboxes, watching them be a part of a show and doing it from the other side of the TV screen was really fun.
“Those guys normally just sit back in their lounge rooms and passively follow along a television show. For them to participate, that blew their minds.”
Deal Or No Deal Celebrity Jackpot Specials premieres Monday July 22, at 7.30pm on 10 and 10 Play.
Mumbrella will run an extended feature interview with Grant Denyer in the coming days.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Deal or No Deal… 20 year old garbage, honestly just declare creative bankruptcy if the ‘best’ gameshow concept you have is that outdated.
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