THE ORIGINAL MILLIONAIRE QUIZ STRIKES GOLD AT LAST
After 121 prior episodes and 264 prior contestants, British quiz show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" finally found Judith Keppel, who had the knowledge needed to claim the biggest prize on television. Chris Dickson takes a look at the circumstances and the Millionaire phenomenon.
Trivia on television? Quiz shows have been a staple of broadcasting ever since the technology was invented. Their history can be tracked from radio through television to the Internet and doubtless they will spread to multimedia forms yet to be devised. Possibly the prevalent trend over the past two years has been the spread of the "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" game show around the world's television channels.
Three London-based radio producers devised the format back in the mid-'90s but it took three years to convince the ITV network in the United Kingdom to risk a game show advertising a top prize a full order of magnitude higher than anything attempted before. The broadcasters also took a big gamble on the show by giving it pride of place in the schedules for an unprecedented ten consecutive days in September 1998.
The show started off by getting decent but unspectacular ratings. However, it received excellent critical acclaim, the like of which had seldom been seen before by a quiz show. Furthermore, the show picked up momentum from series to series - truly this was the first "can't miss" quiz show format in years.
Gripping the public
Even in the current climate where people often choose their viewing from dozens of TV channels, the masses would stop what they were doing to tune in to the show, then discuss what happened the next day by the drinks machine at work.
The awards started to roll in apace too, most notably the Silver Rose of Montreux and the Family Program Category of the New York Festival Awards. Then television companies around the world got in on the act and tried to duplicate the success of the British original, usually with similar consequences. Whether you're playing for pounds, pesetas or potatoes, the game works.
It's great to play and it's great to watch people play. There are so few changes that hosts around the world usually prompt contestants by saying something very close indeed to the local translation of "Is that your final answer?".
Indeed, the same Millionaire game, with only the slightest of variations, has been broadcast in at least forty nations around the world, with a total population that can't be far from two billion. In fact, last year, it's probable that more people watched their local version of the show than watched Formula One motor racing.
The format's owners, Celador Productions, take great care to make sure that the essential gameplay is the same around the world: fifteen questions, three lifelines, take the money after you've seen the question, wrong answers drop you back to the fifth or tenth amount of money you won. Why change a winning formula?
Global Twists
The sums you're playing for are always pretty impressive, too - the show only really works if the contestants are playing for life-changing sums of money. For instance, in Italy, one lira is worth so little that the show takes the premise a step further and tries to create a billionaire, not a millionaire.
In Turkey, their version of the lira is worth less still; a million is barely enough to buy you a cup of coffee, so the show's title - "Kim Besyuz Milyar Ister?" - refers to the show's top prize of half a trillion Turkish lira. Most extreme of all may be India, where the top prize of ten million new rupees represents 121 times the average per capita annual wage.
However, whatever the stake, fifteen correct answers is a rare feat indeed, achieved by only around 1%-2% of all contestants. The first person to crack it was John Carpenter, a tax collector from Hamden, CT in the USA on the 18th of November, 1999. He did it with style, too - not needing to use a lifeline at all except to ring his father and casually inform him that he was about to win a million dollars. Since then, there have been five more top prize winners in the USA, three in Japan, two in France and one in each of Spain, Portugal and South Africa.
Japan celebrated the crowning of the first female champion, Naoko Imao, earlier in the month. Interestingly, Japan's strict laws prohibit anyone from winning more than two million yen on a TV show whereas the jackpot offered is ten million. The way they get around it is that later questions in the Japanese game earn you money not just for yourself but for your friends as well - compensation for the danger of being available to be called and asked a big-money question at any moment.
Suspense at home
Here in Britain, we've had 122 episodes of the show over the last two years, and we've always been wondering when the computer would throw the right combination of questions to a sufficiently brave contestant and trigger a million win.
On the night of Monday 20th November, all our questions were answered; Judith Keppel, a 58-year-old garden designer, correctly replied that the husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine was Henry II (and not Richard I, Henry I or Henry V in order to claim the big prize.
Judith did what two hundred and sixty-four contestants before her had not been able to do. After host Chris Tarrant made us wait through an advert break to find out whether her final answer was correct or not, the following unanimous standing ovation and outpouring of emotion was spontaneous and immense.
Since then, there have been jealous accusations that the fifteenth question was unduly easy, a part of standard school history education, but I guess these are inevitable whenever anyone wins the jackpot, whatever the country. One man who knows lots about question difficulty is Trevor Montague, who sets the fortnightly $500 prize trivia quizzes at the MSO site.
Trevor says, "Contrary to what the media are suggesting, I feel this question was quite a bona fide million pound question and certainly no easier than the last such question, 'Which British monarch was known as the wisest fool in Christendom?'. My verdict on Ms. Keppel's win is that she was a well-educated woman who was in the right place at the right time and really had the gods with her on the day."
The conspiracy theorists have delighted in the fact that the show was aired at exactly the same time as a rival channel's broadcast of the final episode of an extremely popular sitcom. Furthermore, Judith's own house in trendy Fulham, London has been valued at half a million pounds, far more than most, though it has been made clear that Judith herself isn't especially rich. Well, she wasn't especially rich - until Monday night.
Fact and fancy
If you're prepared to dig deep for fanciful coincidences, you can construct a family tree to prove that Judith is a distant descendent of past monarch Edward VII's mistress Alice Keppel. She's also a third cousin of Camilla Parker-Bowles, romantically linked with royal heir Prince Charles. It's even true that Judith's second husband, divorced several years ago, went on to write scripts for a comedian who owns part of Celador Productions, the firm who make the show.
It could even be argued that the magnitude of the win is not as unprecedented as people claim. Radio and TV presenter Chris Evans gave away a million pound prize on radio and another million pound prize on television last Christmas, just to steal Millionaire's thunder.
Also, in the USA, submarine lieutenant Dave Legler won $1,765,000 in NBC's short-lived recent revival of "Twenty One". You may recall that "Twenty One" was notorious for being at the centre of the 1950s quiz-rigging allegations and famously documented in Robert Redford's movie "Quiz Show". The prize there is worth more than a million pounds sterling, but considerable tax must be deducted from that whereas UK quiz winnings are paid tax-free.
Are quiz shows mind sports? It's a hard question to answer - although the lights and pressure don't help, Millionaire's fifteen questions are but a hundred-metre jog compared to the firm, but fair, fifty we ask fortnightly here.
However, Judith Keppel has made a very special place for herself in British TV history and it's certainly good to see people rewarded for using their brains. We hope that there'll be more mental achievement in the public eye in the near future and we'll play whatever part in this we can!
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