Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Yes, as I mentioned briefly up-thread, I will be very interested to see how the play has been adapted to a TV drama.


Way back in this thread are my thoughts upon going to see the play in June 2018. It was a very astute (and well-staged) appraisal of TV game show formats, with lots of pastiches of cheesy 80s gameshows thrown in, as the story of how WWTBAM was created played out. Around all that came the Ingrams' story, with the first half being the 'prosecution' and the second half the 'defence'. Perhaps because the two sides of the story were played in that order, one left the theatre feeling a degree of doubt in the certainty of the prosecution.

Each member of the audience had a '50:50'-style handset and were invited to vote 'Innocent' or 'Guilty' as the play's conclusion, and the night that I was there it hit precisely 50% for each, which was exciting and led to gasps from the audience! (I had wondered if that was rigged to happen every night, but as we left the screens were showing the results from previous nights, so unless those were faked it has to be presumed that I was just there on a night when the result was particularly close.)

It was very much a theatrical piece, and lots of the methods of story-telling wouldn't work on the telly, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it has been reimagined for this medium. I suspect that the two-sided telling of the story (first Celador's side, then the Igrams' side) won't be reprised, as that makes far more sense for a two-half play than a multi-episode TV drama.

People cough differently.
You can train your ears to listen out for a particular cough - even easier if its right behind you, and if
you....slowly.........read........out.....the......answers....and.....wait..for....the....right...cough...from....the....right...direction.

And, you do realise that the sound mixer would be able to isolate every mic in that studio, and give it it's own fader - so even if 20 people were coughing (or throat clearing) at any one time, any obvious or forced cough would show up differently to the others?

As Chris Tarrant has said since, he is in no doubt this was a conspiracy to commit fraud against the British viewing public, as in attempting to win £1 million of their money (via the premium rate phone in contestant line) and to defraud ITV/Celedor.

Yes I suspect that the play and drama will actually have little resemblance - as you say, it doesn’t feel like it would translate well to TV.

It looks like, with the upcoming debut of Quiz, Celador are going around YouTube basically copystriking all the videos on the site showing the old Tonight broadcast about the Major Fraud by Martin Bashir. This doesn't make sense to me, as the programme was broadcast by ITV, and although it contains a lot of content associated to Celador, it makes more sense for ITV to have the content removed, not Celador, but I don't know much about the copyright related stuff

Not sure why they're doing that, yeah it's their copyright and I don't deny that people shouldn't really be reuploading such broadcasts, but given the current renewed interest in the topic, they should just make an endorsed (better quality) copy of that for people to watch.

Same with that "Who wants to Steal a Million" documentary as well, it pretty much doesn't exist on youtube due to most channels having been disabled.

Still though, very interested to watch Quiz!

I don’t think people appreciate how ‘small’ the Millionaire studio actually is unless they’ve sat in the studio audience, the cough from a fastest finger first contestant would have been much more clear to Charles than a cough from the audience

Although coincidentally when I sat in the audience for a Clarkson episode the fastest finger first contestants weren’t micced up, once the successful one had been selected there was a short break in recording whilst they went backstage to be rigged up

Yeah, agreed with you about size. Obviously Millionaire wasn't in my era (in terms of my current age), but the cameras back in the day definitely made the studio larger, especially the distant shot when the lights would go down from £2k and up after correct answers.

I do like that they don't mic up the contestants straight away, it saves them money not having to have multiple microphones. They can just have a few for the relevant people that always need one, and reuse the picked contestant mic for each contestant.

Google probably automatically blocking stuff by mistake. Celador no longer owns Millionaire.

Millionaire is owned by Sony now so I would imagine they're very protected of the IP.

Although if you’d been following this thread, it’s clear that they haven’t been.

Actually a google search shows Celador Entertainment still exists: https://www.celador.co.uk

Even then, they don't know the IP of Millionaire anyway as per earlier comments. Also, companies in general are less likely to care about reuploads of old game shows (even though it's technically illegal, the cost of going after these channels is higher than any possible profit you might get off them and in the current era, people will just reupload them anyway).

But this isn't relevant for here, so I'll leave it at that

Yes, they only sold their TV formats, in fact keeping the movie rights to Millionaire to make Slumdog. They even developed more gameshow formats under the ‘CPL’ brand. Following the sale of Millionaire they also set up Celedor Radio which they have also since sold.

Quite an interesting first part of this interview where discusses Michael Sheen playing him, and the cheating scandal.