Why Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is the Greatest Quiz Show of All Time
There are many liberal uses of the term ‘Greatest of all Time’ (or GOAT) for a variety of topics on the internet, but no declarations of it can quite compare in earnestness to the way I feel when I definitively say that Who Wants To Be A. Millionaire is the greatest quiz show of all time. This series managed to save ITV at the time, perhaps personally being my most watched show on that channel ever, by embracing the drama of winning money with a commitment that inhabited the whole show.
This was not simply a means to test your trivia at home while watching someone win a new kettle along with a holiday in Greece. This was the chance to watch a truly compelling drama unfold as real people grappled with the opportunity of a lifetime.
The producers of this show knew they had something special on their hands, so after an initial setback with the unaired pilot for what was then going to be called Cash Mountain, they quickly turned around a revised approach. Every aspect of the show’s production was turned on its head to make it into what we now know as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: the first quiz show built to be a premium drama series.
Composer Matthew Strachan put together 95 pieces of music for the show. Every eventuality of the show has its own little soundtrack. I love the music in this show as much as I used to back at its launch. There is a comforting speedy pace to those first five questions leading the contestant to a thousand pounds, pushed forward tremendously by a tune I would happily listen to on loop for hours.
Once we get into the next five questions we enter more serious territory. Each question from then on has its own piece of music, a semitone higher than the question preceding it. Strachan made this decision as a subliminal way of adding tension and it works. Its not just the soundtrack to the question that gets higher and higher but the little sting once an answer has been chosen too.
The host Chris Tarrant takes this effect even further, with an exceptional ability to add to the atmosphere with almost maniacal joy, utilising long, silent looks before finally breaking the good or bad news. It all comes together to provide nail biting moments every time.
The set design puts the contestant and Chris Tarrant in the round so they are surrounded by the audience, crew and any other potential contestants. The set was designed by to be uncomfortable, in stark contrast to the typical quiz set made up of bright lights and bright colours to put its players at ease.
The lighting adds to this tremendously, its focus solely on Tarrant and the contestant in the moment of the question, bringing full attention to the life that might change that night. Once a question is answered correctly the set lights up in full, providing a short moment to gasp for air before everything once again descends into darkness as the next question is served up.
The set design, the music, even the Armani suit worn by Chris Tarrant were all required staples for the show’s many international formats. Following its debut in the UK it quickly became a massive success abroad, with most of the international versions launching within three years of its original UK debut.
Such a parity has actually been quite rare for many quiz show exports. Deal or No Deal for instance started in The Netherlands looking relatively similar to its eventual UK counterpart. Admittedly the UK one looked a lot cheaper, with cardboard boxes held shut with sticky tape and a general drabness only upstaged by its host Noel Edmond’s strange choice in shirts.
However when the show went to the US it became an almost parody of American culture. Cardboard boxes were replaced with briefcases and rather than other prospective contestants opening them, twenty six beautiful ladies would stand next to each, offering light flirting to go along with each opening of the game.
The fact that so much of the design and presentation of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire stayed the same abroad is a testament to how on point the music and set design was at building that perfect atmosphere of drama and tension. We would see these very same tools come into play years later when Slumdog Millionaire was released in cinemas, effortlessly supporting and enhancing the actual drama of the narrative.
The big headline grabbing feature of the original show of course was its top prize. It felt like an utterly absurd amount of money at the time, astronomical even, partly due to my young age but also because it was worth a hell of a lot back then. A million pounds in 1998 when the show launched is worth almost double now in 2021 (£1.8m). Its overseas formats rarely actually reached this still astonishing amount of money, with only six countries reaching the equivalent of one million US dollars or more.
Australia offered five million Australian dollars, which even after the exchange rate is worth over three million US dollars. Most of the European formats launched prior to their countries joining the Euro and it paints an interesting picture of the value these currencies had ahead of them being made redundant. The Irish pound for instance was the only currency of the Millionaire European nations to return more Euros for its residents for every pound changed over, helping Ireland slide into a comfortable second place in this ranking of prizes.
More stark of course is those countries where in fact very little was won at all. Obviously there are some currencies where a ‘millionaire’ is nothing of the sort, such as Yen. Japan as a result offered ten million Yen as its original top prize, but even this only amounts to around $87k. Meanwhile Mongolia offered literally one million tögrögs, resulting in its grand prize winner coming away with barely enough money to buy a phone nowadays.
For me in the UK however it was not the one million pound figure that was the most compelling. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire affected me so much that I will forever in my mind hold a special attachment to the idea of £32,000 as a figure of money.
This was the second safety net and it felt like a relatively achievable goal were you to make it onto the show. For me it was the first win that took contestants to life changing territory. £32,000 might finally get you the deposit you need to buy your very first home, or at the very least provide you with mortgage repayments that are slightly more palatable. It is not a sexy use of the money sure, but it represents a plugging of an unfortunate gap many young prospective home buyers have today.
After winning £32,000 you might as well have played the next question as you had nothing to lose and if you happened to get that right, either because you knew or you guessed for the sake of it, suddenly that was doubled. Then you could double it again and again all the way up to a million. It was in these final five questions that the drama of it all would ramp up, because every new step would drastically change your life even more.
Modern TV shows like Squid Game show the kind of ordeals people might be willing to put themselves through to gain financial freedom from the burdens of debt or destitution. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire began that drama in real life quiz shows. People obviously didn’t die, nor did they necessarily reveal specifically how these massive amounts of money might save them, but the camera’s focus on contestants as they wrapped with the thought as to whether or not to answer one of those late questions showed it all. Whatever wasn’t there would inherently be suppled by the viewer at home thinking about these vast sums of money, projecting their own dreams and anxieties through the TV screen onto the action unfolding before them.
I was born too late to experience the fervour of the golden age of Saturday night entertainment on British TV, heralded by the likes of Morecambe and Wise or Bruce Forsyth. Nor have I ever been interested in sports and so have missed out on the community of taking part, whether in the stadium, at home or in the pub, as a fan among fans, dangling on the edge in the midst of constant make or break moments.
However sad as it may sound, Millionaire was my first, and perhaps only, event television. While the tabloids would often spoil it when anyone won the full one million pounds, in the moment of watching someone on a good run the excitement would hit you that maybe this is the day you see someone go all the way.
Event television is harder to come by nowadays as most people choose to watch their TV on demand when convenient or binge a whole season of a show in one weekend. Channel operators still want people to watch live when they can so they can sell adverts. The only TV that can typically guarantee vast amounts of viewers watching live these days is sport.
Certain phenomena can still break through however here and there. The sheer volume of hours that comes from Love Island for instance almost demands live viewing to stay up to date with the gossip in the office the next day. ITV clearly knew it had found a unicorn with a show geared to young people that watch live, rather than on demand, and so obviously have subsequently tried to ratchet it up even more, launching an offshoot show in January at risk of over saturating the brand and diminishing interest in it entirely.
These days I rarely watch TV shows on demand, let alone live with constant ad breaks. As more of a gap forms between the time I once watched live TV and now, when I rarely encounter forced ads for anything, the occasional encounters I do have with live television are often unpalatable. Forced adverts every fifteen minutes is not something I am used to and definitely not something I can tolerate for long.
Those days of Millionaire though represent the last time in my life where that sort of thing made sense. Tarrant would gleefully push to an ad break after someone had locked in their answer, his audience gasping and groaning in response to the realisation that they had to hold on even longer in this tense, uncomfortable moment. Whenever he took one of his characteristically long pauses you’d be on the edge of your seat wondering if you will have to wait five plus minutes to hear if someone had just made the best, or perhaps worst, decision of their life.
Who Wants To Be Millionaire has since come back to our screens in the UK, albeit less frequently than its original, with Jeremy Clarkson now leading at the helm. I am quite the purist when it comes to Millionaire and so have bounced quite hard off the various re-imaginings and re-launches the show has tried over the years.
I am very attached to Chris Tarrant as the host as he brought so much in his delivery I have not seen anyone else achieve. I do not enjoy it when the music or sounds are changed at all and have never liked any gimmicky new lifelines or rules added in. The worst crime was in some iterations when it was cut from fifteen questions to twelve.
That all being said this new version does get my blessing and I will admit it has some interesting ideas. ‘Ask the Host’ is an inspired new lifeline and only works because of the popularity of Jeremy Clarkson as a celebrity, therefore adding an interesting layer of strategy concerning what sorts of questions will most benefit from its use.
Sadly though my spoilt modern sensibility means that even the greatest quiz show of all time is perhaps not worth the frustration of watching adverts, so while this new initiative is a good effort perhaps it is best that Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is instead kept snugly in the cupboard of nostalgia, otherwise known as Challenge, for the rest of its days.
