There's no "Is that your final answer" either. To this day the Australian format doesn't have either because they were the first to buy the format.
The first series had heavy sponsorship from The Sun, which was dropped at Chris Tarrant's insistence after the Sophie Wessex boob scandal which was huge at the time but no one remembers today. I think Jacobs Crackers replaced The Sun as sponsor.
The first ever episode of Millionaire is on YouTube. There's a few differences as you can see, notably no Fastest Finger First and the use of a telephone (very 1998)....
There was Fastest Finger First, but it was just a standard multiple choice question rather than putting four things in order, which came in later series.
The first ever episode of Millionaire is on YouTube. There's a few differences as you can see, notably no Fastest Finger First and the use of a telephone (very 1998)....
There was Fastest Finger First, but it was just a standard multiple choice question rather than putting four things in order, which came in later series.
Would be good if someone had a recording of it from the original airing, with the contestant appeal rather than with Challenge's (badly) remade credits (though they did at least leave in the original endcaps I guess, even the "Carlton for IT* one, which they didn't have to, though whoever uploaded that video cut it out).
The edits by Challenge to S1-S4 were very minor in comparison to edits done by previous companies in the past. The vast majority of the edits were just editing out Chris reading out the phone number and covering up on screen graphics of said number if they intervened into any meaningful discussion.
Other than that, everything else was left in as is (so no random ad breaks thrown into places for no reason), as by that point, Challenge were aware of the need to leave it as true as was possible for the fans to enjoy it properly.
The Sun sponsored the show for a while, maybe until at least Series 3? I have an episode of it on tape - the show was so big at this point that when I realised I was going to miss an episode, I got my aunt to video record it and post it to London - and she lived in Aberdeen!! Nicely she realised the pres geek I was going to become and included the entire Grampian news bulletin beforehand as well, the only VHS I have that's in stereo as we were stuck with mono TVs/recorders well into the noughties.
This episode was on Comic Relief Night from memory (with the audience all wearing red noses) and still featured The Sun sponsorship. Without the phoneline appeals/Chris talking about what's next on ITV the Challenge repeats never feel that complete in comparison - I remember in the early days of ITV3(?) they repeated a series from a few years earlier and left everything in, meaning in late 2004 you had Chris Tarrant happily plugging a phoneline on TV for a series that finished in early 2002. This being before the phoneline scandals of a few years later nobody really cared, indeed at the same time you had Challenge showing old 1990s episodes of Catchphrase where they'd forgot to edit out Roy Walker plugging a long obsolete 0891 number.
Has this one already been linked to, showing how they edited out Ingram on the actual episode that went out. Tarrant introduces the 10 FFF contestants but only reads out 9
Has this one already been linked to, showing how they edited out Ingram on the actual episode that went out. Tarrant introduces the 10 FFF contestants but only reads out 9
