Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

When I was at university, I had an American flatmate who happened to stumble upon Today with Des and Mel which aired on ITV at lunchtime in those days. She told me it was a total rip-off of Live with Regis and Kelly (as it was then).

I looked it up on YouTube and whilst ours was decent lunchtime fodder, I could see it was a pale imitation of Live, which had been on the air for many, many years. Regis just seemed so natural on-screen and the laughs/warmth he got from his guests and the audience came across as really genuine.

He actually did it one more time in a promo for the current US reboot

Thanks for reminding me of this:

I'm almost suprised that was a million dollar question to be honest, but then I do know a lot about American TV from that era, and I've been watching Laugh-In on Amazon over the last few months. Richard Nixon always credited that appearance with him winning the 1968 election.

I remember being taught what a googol was in a year 6 maths lesson. It's always easy when you know the answer!

Also, it’s very easy for the viewer at home to guess the right answer and criticise the contestants but in a studio environment with time pressures, people do freeze.

I knew what a googol was from a trivia book I had as a kid. That and goolgolplex stuck in my head from then

It's interesting how certain facts seem to be stick in the memory. There was a question on The Chase the other day about which word is used to describe a tempo at walking pace and I knew it was andante not because I know anything about music but because it's a title of an ABBA song!

I used to watch no end of quiz shows when I was younger, soaked up a lot of information from them, and I still watch a few of them now and I learn and retain so much. Being a font of useless knowledge comes in really useful on occasion for Pointless, I actually got a pointless answer on a third round board last year, albeit as a viewer but it was still pointless

My proudest home quiz achievement is guessing three Pointless answers in the final round, it was naming anyone who’d starred in an ITV “An Audience With” episode. My guesses were Ricky Martin, Joe Pasquale and Alf Garnett.

Unnecessary.

If you go back and watch the first run of Millionaire on ABC now, it feels like the questions were particularly easy, especially in the early episodes. I can't help but think that was somewhat intentional so that the show would produce some big winners early on to catch peoples' attention. In comparison, the syndicated Meredith Vieira version had more difficult questions (and presumably also a smaller budget,) and the million dollar wins became less common.