It is the most extraordinarily successful quiz show of all-time, and it regularly pulls in viewing figures of over ten million every night it is broadcast on ITV. It has even overtaken Coronation Street and Eastenders in the ratings – no mean feat in an age where the soap operas rule the television airwaves. So what is the success story behind Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
The genesis of Millionaire was created by David Briggs. He, along with Millionaire presenter Chris Tarrant, devised many radio quizzes during his days as producer of Chris’s breakfast show on Capital Radio in London. These quizzes were, in Brigg’s words, “about pushing people’s emotions fairly close to the limit”
Briggs then came up with the idea of a quiz game with a £1m top prize and 21 questions to get there. It was a very basic outline, with one original idea. Two or three million pound winners would send the show plummeting into loss, so Briggs suggested using premium rate phone lines, so in order to get onto the show, people would call in and answer a question, which would cost them about £1, half of which would go into a prize fund. This fund is now in a bank account that only accepts Tarrant’s signature – the cheques he signs on the show are genuine.
Briggs then took the format to Paul Smith, Millionaire’s Executive Producer, at Celador Productions. “From the outset,” says Paul Smith, “we had to determine how we could give away a million pounds as a top prize in a game show. There is no network budget that would support being able to give away the sort of money that we wanted to give away and to cover the production costs of making a programme”
It only reached the screen after months of preparation and two pilot programmes, but from the beginning it had the very enthusiastic support of ITV’s Head of Entertainment, Claudia Rosencrantz. “Paul Smith rang up and asked if he could come into my office to pitch a show. He said ‘I don’t want to send anything in first, I just want to come in and present it. I promise you it will be worth it’. And it really was such an incredibly exciting pitch – I was very excited by the show”
However, aspects of the show worried ITV’s Director of Programmes, David Liddiment. “I was persuaded that the show was a great format, but I was nervous of some of the mechanics of it. For example, I was worried that while it was a great idea that we gave people the question before they decided whether to answer it or not, to give the answers as well struck me as quite dangerous, especially as Paul Smith was talking about a top prize of £1m. I didn’t want ITV or Celador to go bankrupt” Liddiment made the decision that the show should be stripped, that is, to be run on consecutive nights. “I thought he was mad,” says Chris Tarrant, “but he was right”
The show aired for the first time in September 1997 to record audiences, and David Briggs feels that part of Millionaire’s success is based on what he calls “shoutability” – “where everyone watching the show is encouraged to and can’t stop themselves from shouting out the answers at the TV. It is an opportunity for the audience to be actively involved in the programme, and not be passive players. As the contestant is thinking about the answer, millions of people are screaming at the television “the answer is b, quite obviously”, and that is shoutability”
Chris Tarrant is an expert at drawing out the emotions of the contestants right before the audience’s eyes. His way of saying Is That Your Final Answer or Are You Sure? would make any contestant doubt even the most obvious of correct answers. “I think that a lot of people think I’m some kind of sadist, that I’m really putting these poor people through hell. I’m not, I’m not doing it on purpose – I’m stretching them, and I’m making them very, very sure that they really want to play this answer, that it is definitely the answer that they want to play,” says Chris.
Once those who wish to participate have called the premium phone line number, they are asked a general knowledge question. If they get it correct, they are then asked on which particular day they would like to play, should they be selected. 100 of those people are called back and are chosen completely at random, but from different areas of the country. Those 100 people are asked what Celador calls a “nearest to” question. The 10 that get it nearest to the correct answer are the ones who are invited to come and play on the programme.
The production crew do not meet the contestants until lunchtime on the day they are to do the show. Most of them have never been in a TV studio before, so they have a very short amount of time to be familiarised with everything and how to play. “The important thing,” says Millionaire’s Producer Coleman Hutchinson, “is for the contestants to enjoy themselves and have a great day out”
Chris insists on rehearsing the contestants himself. “I think that a lot of people are surprised that I do the afternoon rehearsals,” he says, “but I think that it is essential. We get such a broad cross-section of people and none of us know what they’ll be like”
The producers of Millionaire are after live, real emotion. For this reason, Celador prefer women to men – they tend to react more vividly. The ratings depend on reactions and the degree to which the audience identifies with the player’s anguish. Fiona Wheeler is talked of fondly – the Essex woman who ticked off her credit card bills at each stage, as is Perry Poole, who leapt about like mad and then gambled fatally on £125,000 and went home with only £32,000. Academics and teachers fair less well on the show – “you have to know a little about a lot, not a lot about a little to do well on this show” says Briggs.
One of the best-kept secrets about the show is the team of question setters. Their identities are safeguarded, and their names do not appear on the credits of the show. “The question setters are locked away in various parts of the country,” says David Briggs. “They write the questions which all come to London. I edit them and when that’s done, and we have 2500 questions ready, Paul Smith and I go away to a secret destination and sit in a room for 5 days to review every question. We reckon that we set a level that then is the same for everyone. It may be high for some people and low for others, but it is essentially the same. The computer then automatically sorts them by level and in any stack of 15 questions it will automatically ensure that there is no repetition of certain subjects or types of questions. The computer then gives out a stack of questions that will appear on Chris Tarrant’s computer screen”
“I do not see the questions beforehand or see the answers on my screen,” says Tarrant. “So when I go through the Is This Your Final Answer? routine it is completely genuine. Only when the contestant has chosen their final final answer do I actually see it on my screen”
The amazing success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire has generated interest from TV companies around the world. So far, 51 countries have bought the show, and nearly all of them came to Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, where the show is recorded, to see how it is made. “We started receiving calls from countries wanting to produce the show and to buy the Millionaire format. The USA has been the most significant, because it is the home of the TV game show and it is very rare to export any British programmes there. One of the conditions is that each country that buys the format must use the same music and set. Modifications are considered for cultural differences and applications for these must be made to us”
Chris Tarrant’s schedule is enough to send anyone crawling back under the covers of their nice warm beds in the mornings. “I think that a lot of people are amazed at my schedule at the moment, it really is complete madness. I crawl away from Elstree at midnight-ish at the end of a recording and I’m up again at 5.15am the next morning, and on the radio at 6.00am. It’s the way that I’ve lived for so long that I’m used to it. It’s a bit like being a band on tour at the moment. I’m literally doing the show, crashing out at a hotel in the middle of town, getting up, doing the radio and going back to Elstree. But I sleep – when I get to Elstree I have an hour or so. I sometimes actually go fishing, just to get away from phones, rehearsals and talking to the guys about the show. I just need to switch off for a bit”
Despite his gruelling schedule, Tarrant is committed to the show. Rumour has it that the show has another two years of life in it, and Smith expects it to be running somewhere in the world for the next 20 years. It is difficult to see how Millionaire could be improved – it is so simple, and so gripping. An episode cannot be missed.
So what lies in Millionaire’s future? There are those who say that the show will soon run out of steam because there hasn’t been a million pound winner for a while. In America there have already been several million-dollar winners. “We refuse point-blank to be seen in any way to dumb it down or to give contestants a final leg-up to win a million,” says Tarrant.
|
