Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

I remember during the Tarrant era, sometimes Chris read out the full answers. Eg if you think the answer is "Cardiff" press A etc. Or sometimes it was just A, B, C or D, all vote now. I never thought anything of it at the time, but I'd guess now it was to do with if an episode was running early/late, to fit into the time. Especially as normally they panned over the audience when it was being read out, I'd guess the shorter version could have been prerecorded from an earlier show and just played over generically

This might be of interest to you all:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trailer/id1505545993?i=1000470082723

I was a contestant on the first Clarkson series and have to point out this isn't quite correct.

All FFF contestants are micced when in the studio because of the obvious history with Millionaire but instead of each person having a pack in their back pocket, the mic is connected to a socket in the chair. If you win FFF you are then rigged up properly. Rest assured, it is made clear any noise you make on set is heard by production!

One bloke sat next to me clearly forgot this as when the first contestant was playing their game he kept whispering what he thought the answers were to me! I tried to ignore him as much as possible as was terrified of getting chucked out!

Ah right, that’s interesting to know! It’s clever how they put it together in editing so it all looks like one take, so the winner has to fake a bit of a shocked reaction even though they know they’ve already been selected!

On another note, quite bizarre to have Mark from The Chase as a phone a friend followed by Richard from Pointless turning up 5 minutes later!

Another mic fact - you are warned not to jump up because you'll rip the mic out of the seat as it's quite a short chord.

I was lucky enough to win a round of FFF and not only ignored that advice, but also turned round to hug my wife I was so shocked, which is another no no. Needless to say they went with the re-take of my reaction. The mic was unharmed which may be why I got away with it in the end!

I thought he'd do better than he did.

In the original series there was a similar edit point, which is actually more obvious and is noticeable due to a set design flaw.



Notice the hot seat suddenly appear from nowhere as Chris drags the contestant to play.

Initially the wide shot of Chris during fastest finger first required the removal of the hot seat as otherwise it would block the view of the camera. So they'd have to keep moving it in and out. Eventually they remedied this by using a tighter shot.

You can see in later episodes where the chairs shifted in a similar edit, they were moved further in than normal, as not to block the shots of the Fastest Finger First contestants - obviously quite a bit quicker than moving the wholes seating area away each time.

Ahh, watching that first episode clip back, look at that lovely properly aligned prize ladder!

I found it amusing when those episodes were uploaded at the surprised comments at how amazing the picture quality was - some just assume that 1990s TV was always blurry with washed out colours as they're used to either old VHS uploads or zoomed-in/stretched widescreen versions of SD footage. It's the equivalent to me twenty+ years ago thinking 1960s TV was always full of scratches and crackily optical sound, not realising the difference between 405 line videotape and 16mm telerecordings sent around the world.

It's odd for me to see repeats of early-mid 2000s shows looking far worse than I remember, even in 16:9 SD - but much of the time it's because I'm viewing them on a Freeview channel with a low bitrate, giving a worse quality than when I saw them on my old analogue TV at the time despite the extra picture on the sides. At least those Series 1 repeats of Millionaire look good in comparison.

How long did they use a physical phone for?

Just the first episode.