If you’re a student, unemployed or addicted to hard drugs there's nothing quite like daytime TV to get you through the day as you ponder life and wonder when the next giro cheque will come through.

Of course, pissing your life away wouldn’t be complete with weapons-grade shit TV. Besides watching repetitive adverts for car insurance, loans or no win no fee compensation lawyers there is really nothing to watch. However, there is currently an ongoing trend for mind-numbingly dreadful gameshows where people with the intelligence of a peanut are courted to fill in the missing letter to word Sp*de, then charged three quid a minute and held on the line for 20 minutes. Recently phone-in competitions have been slapped on the wrist for misleading stupid viewers and now another one has come under fire, the student favourite Deal Or No Deal. 

Deal Or No Deal is the random show where people come on, tell a heart-ripping story how they need to raise money for their parent’s gravestone or something and then win fuck all. Basically there is no skill is involved unless you can’t count or are distracted by middle-aged men who ponce around talking to an invisible bloke at the end of an imaginary phone line. With all the recent phone in scandals involving Blue Peter and Richard and Judy, yet another phone in problem is the last thing that money-grabbing programmes like this need.

However, its not the first time that Deal or No Deal has been in the public eye. It caused the beloved host Noel Edmonds a sore wrist that wasn’t apparently caused through constant wanking; instead the Deal Or No Deal phone was blamed as it was too heavy. Hmm, this being the same bloke who likes to drive around pretty much naked. Of course, this is while he pervs over women judging dodgy modelling competitions. We can only imagine Noel stroking his beard as he pervs over the totty in front of him. 

The problem with Deal Or No Deal is that the bloody programme is not live; so the bods behind the scenes already know how much money the phone-in callers will win at the end of the show because the bit where the audience-member randomly picks the amount for the viewer to win was all prerecorded. 

Now Icstis, the regulator of premium-rate phone in hotlines, has fined Deal Or No Deal £30,000 for misleading viewers into believing they have a chance of winning big randomly when the prize amount has probably been known since March 2006. 

For the rest of this article, please ring 0901 489 0214 to find out, calls will be charged at £1.50 a minute and will last 20 minutes before we actually get round to telling you the article was over already. Just don’t tell Icstis. 

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£30,000 Fine For No-Deal Phone-In – BBC