I watched WWTBAM for the first time in ages last night after a tip-off that something interesting happened, it did, and I’ll save it for later in the post so you’ve got a chance to walk away if you haven’t watched it or encountered the news yet, although you may be able to pick it up sooner so reader beware.
What struck me pretty immediately is that for the show that was built on slow, tense reveals, under the current management it got through the titles, introducing the contestants, Fastest Finger First and the first twelve questions in under 12 minutes. Sure, we had a contestant who was pretty confident in most of his answers, but it also struck that many of the questions even towards the upper levels were not all that difficult. Is quickfire Millionaire standard, regular viewers?
It was also interesting that a 50:50 situation came up – at a really high level question – where after an Ask the Audience and some discussion it did not leave the two most obvious (or difficult to choose between) answers. I’m told that despite the removal of “random” from the “remove two random wrong answers” host instruction it had for a while, the removed answers are still indeed random.
Anyway Nicholas Bennett has the dubious honour of being the first UK civilian contestant to go for the million pounds and lose, although he still won £125,000. Still, we think £375,000 is the largest amount of money willingly risked and lost on a UK gameshow – no Limitless Win doesn’t count because the money isn’t yours to risk until it is banked, and you can’t walk away from The Million Pound Drop, so that doesn’t count either.
He was the best contestant in years and absolutely right to go for it with an educated hunch and six figure safety net. Arguably went one two early in setting the safety net but always think tactically setting it one below your target is the smart move and at that point easy to blow 4 lifelines on one question.
Agree the pacing is really quick which is refreshing but makes it a costly hour for ITV. Contestants, often of the same ilk, getting through to six figures with ease has been a big problem with the Clarkson era and arguably down to casting as much as the questions. Clarkson is quite dismissive of anyone who only gets to around £16k but that was probably about tge average in the early years.
I have it in my head – and as lots of random things live in my head, this might be nonsense…still though…I have it in my head that one person was on £500,000 and went for the million and got it wrong – and went back to £32,000. That would be a loss of £468,000…but I’m struggling to stand it up. Anyone remember – or have i dreamed it up on my own???
Happened in the celeb version with Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen but the question was subsequently thrown out and he got another chance and stuck with £500k.
Ah…thank you – I thought I was going mad!!
The million pound questions are always fascinating. This one felt gettable through elimination – I didn’t know the answer directly but the origins of the other answers are less obscure. Take yahoo, which has been mentioned a lot in news articles about the website. Just unfortunate the contestant didn’t know it.