Weaver's Week 2009-10-04

Who Wants to be a Millionaire (1998 – present) was the end of a chain that stretched back through the 1990s. The Conservative government had reduced the regulatory burden on television and radio producers in the early 1990s, and one of the rules swept away was the maximum prize. The IBA had fretted in 1989 lest the Irish-licensed Atlantic 252 attract audiences by giving away huge amounts of money, possibly as much as £1000. ITV began its newly deregulated era by giving away £10,000 cars on Celebrity Squares (1993), then £100,000 houses on Raise the Roof (1995), and within three years had added the last nought for one million pounds, cheque.

Though a million pounds was available, it wasn't going to be won easily. In the six runs of Millionaire up to the end of 1999, no-one had won the top prize, no-one had won the half-million, and only a handful of people had faced the half-million question. Though maverick radio DJ Chris Evans had given away a million quid twice in late 1999, the Millionaire top-prize winner was what the nation wanted to see. The chase continued through the spring – Peter Lee will never forget Durham cricket club, Peter Spyrides and Kate Heusser faced the final question, but also walked away. Episode 100 passed in October, and still the prize was unwon.

Tarrant was – and still is – one of the greatest hosts on television. He makes a hideously complicated show look effortless, and he is able to talk to the contestants without influencing them in any way. It's a tribute to his great skill, and the simplicity of the format, that Millionaire has remained a regular on the schedules to this day – there aren't a hundred shows a year, as in 2001, but for any prime time show to last eleven years is an achievement in itself.

But Millionaire had its seedy underbelly. The programme was financed from premium-rate telephone calls, and there was a long-running suspicion that the producers were weeding out the strongest contestants to encourage others to call. This was never proven, and the evidence for such a conspiracy was basically that no-one had yet won the million-pound prize. No, Millionaire's ethical problems came from its contestants. The story of Charles Ingram has been told often enough, not least in previous editions of this column. Less well-documented was the Daventry Ring, which may have involved help on the final qualifying round, or of people using this new-fangled Internet thing to help answer phone-a-friend questions, in exchange for a cut of the winnings. (See the Weeks of 10 May 2003 and 13 Feb 2005). This wasn't in the spirit of the games, and came to an end after Celador warned the perpetrators off.

By then, Celador's next big project had crashed and burned. The People Versus (2000-2) offered unlimited rewards to contestants who were prepared to invest unlimited days in the studio and answer questions on a limited range of subjects. One wrong answer would cost them their place in the game, and the person who set the question would take their place in the next show. But the programmes were painfully slow, the contestants had too many lifelines at their disposal, and the whole experience didn't work. Many of the best bits were recycled for a daytime version, general knowledge questions against the clock, but even that had the unnecessary complication of The Bong Game to disrupt matters.

The shows immediately afterwards pretended to have big prizes, but offered other thrills – Saturday Night Takeaway (2002-9) offered the contents of an ad break, but this was nothing more than a hook around which Antan Dec could hang a rather good light entertainment show. Over on the BBC, Come and Have a Go If You Think You're Smart Enough (2004-5) took the premium-rate entry idea, added various technical ideas that were perhaps a little ahead of their time, and almost made a decent interactive quiz out of it. The second series junked much of the technogubbins to leave a solid quiz. Duel (2008) is the only quiz to appear since 2001 that's threatened to give away six-figure prizes with any regularity.

It's not the only show that's threatened to give away huge amounts of money. That thread began with In It to Win It (2002 – present), which by dint of being very simple to follow, has proven the longest-running of all the games around the UK lottery. People come up to play, Dale Winton asks them some multiple-choice questions, and the more they get right, the more they stand to win. The top prize of £100,000 has been won a couple of times, and it's clear that everyone – win or lose – is treated well and has a lovely time. How could it not be lovely, Dale's involved.

Deal has had more than its fair share of imitators. Most blatant was The Colour of Money (2009). It combined the concept of opening boxes (er, starting and stopping cash machines) with the tedium of the bong interlude from The People Versus. Though the show had lots going for it – Chris Tarrant, a phenomenally pretty and well-designed set, ITV's hype machine – the designers forgot to include any game. Daytime pilot The Fuse (2009) took a perfectly good quiz and wrapped it up in some rather pointless box guesswork, meaning that at least one contestant played the ultra-tense final game for the princely sum of ... one pound. That's not even his bus fare home!

Three other programmes have given away a million pounds during this decade. We'll address Survivor in a later installment, and turn to the red-haired child of this decade, The Vault (2002-4). Contestants bid to buy answers from players in the studio and on the telephone, with a jackpot game that usually went to a caller at home. One of those callers, Karen Shand, won a million quid from the comfort of her armchair on a hot summer's night in 2004. The Vault's problem was that it was a pale imitation of the Israeli original – there, the show went out live, callers were screened and the contestant knew that they knew the answer.

These were niche programmes. Golden Balls (2007-9) turned greed into something bizarrely popular. Jasper Carrott presided as grown people lied, shouted, bitched, and generally acted as though they had an entitlement to huge amounts of money, before eventually playing the very same endgame as Robert Kilroy-Silk's show. Though dressed up in huge amounts of shiny sheen, Goldenballs was all about the worst side of human nature. It wasn't about people as people, it was about people as backstabbers. Players weren't removed because they might be a threat, they were removed because other people were worried they hadn't been dealt a good hand. Removal of the unlucky, of the unconvincing. Survival of the nastiest.

Fear that someone else might be earning more wasn't confined to the small screen. Out in the real world, bankers were shuffling numbers like so many chips, and their bosses were letting them take home astronomical amounts of money. The gamblers hadn't done anything to earn this dough, it just rolled in through sheer luck but the bosses were worried that if they didn't pay "the going rate", the gamblers would go off and gamble on someone else's dime. Eventually, the bets on black failed, and the whole house of cards came crashing down.

As the crash hit the real world, there was evidence that this glad-handing of big business was offensive – the commentary to Natural Born Dealers (filmed 2007, shown 2008) laughed at its salesmen, rather than with them. The Last Millionaire (2008) sought to find the most inept ego-driven young entrepreneur, and both The Restaurant (2007 – present) and Design for Life (2009) judge on criteria other than pure profit.

The business world's greed and fear spread far and wide. During 2005 and 2006, we couldn't move for call-and-lose quiz programmes. These shows asked questions more obscure than they appeared, waved big cash prizes, and almost demanded that viewers call in lest someone else win that dosh. The real winners were the promoters, who would take 50p from every call, and only let a very few callers through to air.

It was a bubble economy, and like all bubbles, it was going to burst. It went in spring 2007, and splattered almost everyone. Richard and Judy's chat show was the first scapegoat, then we heard that GMTV was picking winners before the lines had closed, Gameshow Marathon and Dancing on Ice had votes going missing, Deal or No Deal's legalised telephone lottery proved to be less than legal, a handful of BBC competitions had been pre-recorded. And it went on, and on, and on.

Three examples of blatant and premeditated deception stand out. Antan Dec had asked for callers from anywhere in the country to play on the Jiggy Bank, but had already determined the broad location from which their winner would be picked. Their Gameshow Marathon (2005) awarded prizes based, in part, on how the researchers thought the contestants would react on screen. Then there was Endemol, who regularly invented winners to its Brainteaser (2002-7) programme, putting a member of staff on air if the first two people it called gave a wrong answer. (Weeks of 1 July and 21 October 2007).

In neither of these cases was there a concerted attempt to prevent prizes from being given away. Even this figleaf was absent from GCap's Secret Sound competition, where an instruction from management was interpreted as "don't let anyone win the competition", and losing entries were deliberately selected to go to air. GCap attempted to cover up its tracks, offered inconsistent explanations to the regulators, and was fined over a million pounds. (Week of 29 June 2008)

The first programme to cover its prize costs through premium-rate phonelines was Millionaire. Abuse of this system brought it crashing down into an unpopular heap, and the regulator has effectively banned the use of premium-rate phonelines to raise revenue. It would be difficult to make Millionaire in that way now, people were just too greedy and didn't know when to stop.

At the third starter, St George's London get going. This institution was established in 1733, and famous students include Patrick Steptoe and Edward Jenner, whose cow innocculated against cowpox is on display in the library. Though Thumper doesn't mention it, the college is a medical college, and all four members say they're studying medicine. Bit of a giveaway, there. The first visual round is on the wives and girlfriends of world leaders, as seen at the G20 photo-opportunity in London earlier this year. Neither team gets it, and York has a 30-25 lead.

The visual bonuses eventually go to St George's, where they confuse Mr. Rudd, the prime minister of Australia, with Miss Tyrynenko, the prime minister of Ukraine; and have no idea who Mr. Hu of China is. Magic circles also evade the medics entirely, and disallowing "Diego Garcia" for the "Chagos Islands" is a bit harsh in our reckoning.

Q: What two-word term describes the gelatenous membrane between the retina and the iris in the eyeball?

St George's: Aqueous humour

Thumper: What? No! It's the vitreous humour.

These people are medics? Take us to the audio round, which is basically asking "who wrote The South Bank Show's theme music?" The bonuses continue in this vein, and though the medics know it's The Apprentice, they don't know it's Prokofiev. From Romeo and Juliet, fer cryin' out loud. St George's leads 95-25.

Another physiology question goes to the medics, but they're less good at royal abdications, not even answering Austria-Hungary at the right time. Now, were any of the team watching Panic Attack over the summer? If they were, they'll have recognised the question asking for cities with a single letter as their postcode. Another visual round, and it's a detail of a painting. Some obscure painting called the "Mona Lisa". It brings York back into the game, and they trail by 135-40.

Meriel Whalan was best on the buzzer for York, getting two starters: the team managed 4/12 bonuses with one missignal. Charley Tinsley (six starters) banged well for St George's, their bonus rate was an unconvincing 14/39 with two missignals. With four starters dropped by both sides, there were 36/73 questions right, slightly less than half marks.

Next match: St Andrews v Somerville Oxford