Tarrant - Millionaire Moments: The Story of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

Table of Contents

Chris Tarrant was born in Reading, educated at Kings School in Worcester and obtained a BA Hons in English Literature at Birmingham University. He started his television career as a newsreader for ATV in the early 1970s and soon became a household name as producer and presenter of the hugely popular childrens Saturday morning TV show TISWAS . Chris has presented Tarrant on TV since 1988 and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? since September 1998. He has also hosted the Capital FM Breakfast Show in London since April 1987.

Rebel, Rebel

Ready, Steady, Go!

Tarrant off the Record

Millionaire Moments

CHRIS TARRANT

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Published by Hachette Digital 2008

Copyright Chris Tarrant 2002

The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Photographs Celador Productions Limited
The WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? logo
is the property of Celador Productions Ltd
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7481 0911 1

This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

Hachette Digital
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette UK Company

Introduction

Its almost exactly four years to the day since I was last able to walk down a street anywhere in the British Isles without somebody somewhere winding down a car window and shouting, allo, Chrissy - wanna Phone-A-FRIEND? Its no problem but, of course, each time I have to pretend that Ive never, ever heard this before in my life! In my TISWAS days in the seventies, people used to shout, Gotta custard pie, Chris? as if I somehow carried them, hidden away beneath my clothes, at all times. It comes with the territory. Its been happening to people like Brucie for years - I see it as the publics way of saying, we really like that show youre doing.

The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? catchphrases seem to have seeped into the public consciousness not just of this country, but of the whole world. Phone-A-FRIEND has been referred to in the House of Commons; Ask the Audience and Ill go 50:50 have been used in the American Senate; in Japan, you hear the phrases, Is that your final answer? and Do you want to Phone-A-FRIEND? spoken around the country in high-speed staccato English.

When we filmed our first shaky pilot on 12 August 1998, with just over three weeks to go before transmission, not one of us had any idea that we were going to spawn an unprecedented international game-show phenomenon. Since the first-ever show was transmitted here in the UK by ITV on 4 September 1998, we have aired 276 programmes in the UK; 687 people have sat in the legendary hot seat; and in total 30,931,000 has been won. Since the programme was launched 37,973,366 calls have been made to the contestant recruitment line! After a long wait for the first 1,000,000 winner - Judith Keppel, a garden designer from Fulham, who won a million on 20 November 2000 - two subsequent contestants have been made millionaires as a result of the show: David Edwards, a teacher from Staffordshire, who won a million on 21 April 2001, and Robert Brydges, an ex-banker and writer of childrens books, who got his million on 29 September 2001. In October 2000 Duncan Bickley lost the highest-ever sum on the show in the UK, when he got the 500,000 question wrong and dropped a vast 218,000, going back down to 32,000.

Six people have had the opportunity to see the 1,000,000 question, at which point they have quit and left with 500,000. Five people have left with no money at all. We have also run special celebrity editions of the show for charity during the past three years, in which just under 1,000,000 has been won by stars such as Carol Vorderman; Sky Sports presenters Andy Gray and Richard Keys; David Baddiel and Frank Skinner; Jonathan Ross and his wife Jane Goldman; and Christine and Neil Hamilton.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has won a hat-trick of national TV awards; a comedy award from BAFTA - puzzling because its the straightest show Ive ever done! - and many other international prizes.

In only its second week of release the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? computer game created UK chart history by becoming the first-ever title to top the all-formats chart - Playstation, PC and Dreamcast - in the same week. It proceeded to have a record eighteen weeks at the number-one spot on the chart. The game also became the fastest to sell one million copies in UK chart history, ahead of Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II .

The superlatives go on and on. The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? quiz books from publishers Boxtree have sold over a million copies, the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? board game was the best-selling game for the third year running in 2001 and the on-line game has already proved a massive hit for ITC On-line, registering 1.1 million users since its launch last April - thats an average of four thousand new registrations every day, who between them have played the game over twenty-two million times! Other Millionaire games on the internet are played in excess of three quarters of a million times a month in nine different countries.

Mobile Millionaire is now the worlds most popular mobile game and is available to over 300 million subscribers. It also won the Best Consumer Wireless Application or Service Award at the GSM World Congress - the Oscars of the wireless world!

We may not have known that the show would take the world by storm, but we certainly realised that Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? was a good game - even a great game. Like all great ideas, its success lies in its simplicity. Billy Cotton Jnr - for years Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC - said to me a couple of years ago, There have only been two perfect shows in my lifetime in television: This Is Your Life and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? He is right: Millionaire has the perfect format for a really exciting quiz; fifteen questions worth escalating amounts of money; four possible answers to each; three Lifelines to call on at any time; the choice to quit and take the money if you get stuck; the chance to win 1,000,000 if you never get stuck. Thats it. In a couple of lines Ive just told you everything you need to know about the game! The masterstroke is previewing each question and its four possible answers to allow contestants to decide whether or not to gamble the money they have already won. After all, who in their right mind would risk losing 500,000 before knowing what theyll be asked to win a million? This way, too, great suspense is created for the audience - they can empathise with the contestants dilemma, and have a stab at answering the questions themselves.

David Briggs, for many years my producer at Capital Radio, is co-deviser of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? One crucial element to its success is what David terms shoutability. When we worked together on radio David dreamed up most of the competitions that I ran, and they all had people screaming abuse at the radio. They couldnt believe that so-and-so contestant could be so dumb as to not know such-and-such an answer. Davids genius was to adapt this concept to TV -