Our Very Own Millionaire Adventure

18th April 2020

Watching Quiz this week (it’s brilliant, do give it a watch if you haven’t already) got Lois and me reminiscing about our very own experience on Who Wants to be a Millionaire just a few months after the Major Ingram coughing incident.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

(And if you can’t face working your way through this ridiculously long post, skip straight to the footage of us looking very young and rather naïve.)

When Millionaire first came onto TV, I was immediately enchanted by it. Its simplicity, its playalongability, its tension, all made it compelling viewing. I watched it avidly, shouting at the screen as I did so. Slowly my obsession grew. I played the Millionaire slot game in the pub, bought the quiz book. I loved the idea of getting on the show. Why?

- Because Lois and I had just got married, and had no money.
- Because I loved the programme and wanted to become a part of it.
- And most of all, because I fancied my chances. I reckoned I could be a contender.

Every so often, I dialled the Millionaire premium number in an effort to get on the show, but this was the period of peak Tarrant, with the programme attracting about 14 million viewers per episode, so my chances were tiny, and at £1 a pop, rather costly to a penniless newly wed.

And then it came. A trailer from heaven.

Lois spotted it first. An advert for the Who Wants to be a Millionaire newlywed special. Only open to couples who had got married in the previous 12 months. People like us!

I did a quick calculation, and realised that for a short period, only a very small segment of the nation’s population would be eligible to enter Millionaire, and that every £1 spent on trying to enter during that window had massively more bang for its buck (process point — every time you call, you are put into a random draw, so the more entries you pay for, the better your chance of getting called back). I concluded that the logical thing to do was to focus all the calls that I would otherwise put in over the course of my life — do them all during that newly wed entry window. So I did, calling 100 times over the course of a weekend.

And it worked.

I was working at an advertising agency at the time. This is a crucial point — I’ve spent most of my career in television, and couldn’t have taken part if I worked in TV production, but during that brief soujourn into advertising I was sitting at my desk at the agency when the phone rang.

“Hello, this is Who Wants to be a Millionaire, I’m really happy to tell you that you have a 1 in 10 chance of getting on the show.”

Shit!

“I’m about to ask you a question, and you have 10 seconds to answer it. The closest answer out of 10 people being asked it gets on the show.”

Double shit!

“What is the length of the film ‘Chicken Run’ in seconds?”

It was a bizarre moment, surrounded by workmates who were completely oblivious to the quiz show jeopardy into which I had suddenly been thrown.

I hadn’t seen ‘Chicken Run’ but I knew it was a cartoon, so couldn’t be too long, couldn’t be more than 90 minutes. So I quickly calculated 60 x 90, and answered “5400”.

“Thanks very much, we will let you know in a week if you are on the show.”

I immediately looked up the answer, and found that the film was 85 minutes long, so the correct answer was 5100. Very very close. I asked around everyone I knew, how would they answer with 10 seconds available? Most people didn’t get near (interestingly the only other people who came close were my dad Nigel and my brother Tim, who think the same way as me). So I concluded that there was a very good chance that Lois and I would be on Millionaire.

It being a newlywed special, Lois and I would both be in the hot seat if we got that far the following week. What to do with that week? The answer was obvious. Learn every fact in the world.

Every. Single. Fact.

Thing is, it turns out that there are a lot of facts out there. A lot of information. But we did our best, setting up our very own fact-learning boot camp — drawing up list of kings and queens, PMs and presidents, the periodic table, capitals and works of Shakespeare. Cramming like we were sitting every exam of our lives in one hour the following week.

We did all of this understanding that it could end up being a complete waste of time, but then the fateful call came. Celador Productions phoning to give us the news.

We were on the show!

We were given one day’s notice, so we had 24 hours to do further fact crunching and strategising. The big decision — who to select for phone a friend? We had accepted by then that some facts would remain unlearned, and that this choice would likely be crucial. We could choose up to 5 people, and on the night (if we got that far) we could decide who to use.

After a lot of discussion, we went with my parents’ friend Lewis as our main phone a friend. As well as being a lovely man, Lewis was famously the quiz king of Glasgow, a real all-rounder. He kindly agreed to take part, and having talked through with him his main areas of knowledge (most things) we supplemented him with a few other people who were strong in areas where Lewis was weak.

The other key point was going to be — how lucky did we feel? What were we prepared to risk, if we weren’t sure of the right answer? On that we were clear, the target was to get to £32k, as you keep that whatever happens, which gives you a risk-free guess for £64k. After that, take no risks. But get to £32k.

We couldn’t quite believe it. We were going to be on Millionaire. This could change everything.

We spent a memorable day in Elstree Studios. We were interviewed by a researcher looking for interesting facts about us that she could feed to Chris. The best she could get out of me was that I didn’t like dogs (are you listening Ziggy?) Brilliant, years of waiting for my big moment, and my statement of identity to the nation ended up as, “This is Greg. He doesn’t like dogs.”

We went in to meet the other contestants. We were all perfectly pleasant to each other, but we each understood implicitly that these other fuckers were our enemies, the ones who could stop us from taking what was rightfully ours. Lois and I had elected that I’d be our fastest finger contestant — we did a trial run, three goes at fastest finger to get the hang of it. Three times I sat there like a tub of lard, I didn’t even get the answers right. I suddenly realised that after all the excitement, I would most likely sit there for an hour like a grinning twat, with a little wave to camera all I’d have to show for it.

Evening fell. We freshened up, phoned our phone a friends to prepare them — the key instruction from the producers being “it’s not every day that Chris Tarrant calls, so if he does, act surprised.” And then we were taken out — me to the front, and Lois in the audience.

The thing I hadn’t expected was how slowly the programme moves. Contestants get as much time as they want to answer questions. Filming is very stop and start, and the hot seat segment is not nearly as tense as the final cut of the show makes it appear. But fastest finger is different. That’s the heart-pumping, adrenaline-fuelled there-can-be-only-one moment. I hadn’t got hold of a fastest finger practice machine a la Major Ingram, and in fact I have fat clumsy fingers. I looked along at my opponents. Their fingers suddenly all looked lean, slick and agile compared to my chubby digits. I was very very tense.

First go for real, I came nowhere. Damn.

Another newly wed couple got through, and with it emerged the worst side of me. Every question they answered correctly meant less time for the rest of us, so less chance to get on. We collectively willed them to lose. And they obliged, dropping out on £1,000.

Second go.

“Starting with the most, put these men in order of how many Wimbledon singles titles they have won.”

The options were Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Stefan Edberg, Boris Becker.

I had a moment of key recognition, and I went for it. Not particularly quickly, but I was pretty sure I was going to be right.

The key point about this one was that Agassi only won one Wimbledon. But how many of my opponents would know that? It turned out, not many. Only two of us were correct, and by 0.83 seconds, I was the quickest.

We were through!

Lois came down to join me and there we were, in the Who Wants to be a Millionaire hot seat, our appointment with destiny confirmed.

I’m not going to give you a blow by blow account of our performance in the hot seat. The footage tells the story better than I could.

But here are a couple of spoilers. We used our Ask the Audience at £300. £300! We were pretty sure of the answer, but not 100%, and figured better the embarrassment of asking the audience so early than the utter humiliation of being eliminated on the third, kindergarten-level question.

At that point, they took a break, as it was the end of the episode. This meant that we could briefly leave the studio to change shirts (to make it look like we were returning to the next episode the following evening). We had 10 minutes alone, to take in what was happening. This was a beautiful moment of our lives. The moment of untold promise. We were in the hot seat, with most of our lifelines intact, and anything could happen.

Back to the studio, and this time we got to walk in hand in hand with Chris Tarrant. Lois often tells me that this was her favourite moment, our celebrity glamour moment. Lois, me and Chris. Old pals, back together.

And then, back to the hot seat.

We chatted, discussed, crawled our way towards our target £32k, using our second lifeline along the way. We made it to £16,000, and geared up for the big one.

“Ludwig Kochel famously catalogued the works of which composer? Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner or Handel.”

Who?

Famously?

What?

Such a sinking feeling. I literally had no idea, I’d never heard of this Kochel fella. And Lois immediately made it clear that her knowledge bank was also a Kochel-free zone.

And then a surge of hope. Classical music was one of Lewis’ specialities. We would phone our friend, and we would surely make it to £32k. We had 30 seconds. Come on Lewis!

And what happened? Watch it yourself. But we ran out of time. We knew Lewis was about to say something about Mozart. But not necessarily to tell us that he thought it was the right answer.

We took the money. Our moment of untold promise was over.

We were strangely downbeat straight after. We hadn’t managed our expectations appropriately, so initially only getting to £16,000 somehow seemed like a defeat. Ridiculous, of course, we had utterly lost perspective. Then we walked into the green room where all the other contestants were. They all congratulated us as the evening’s big winners. They’d all gone in with the same big hopes, and most of them had won nothing. We were indeed very very fortunate.

And it was life-changing.

We went to the supermarket the day after it was transmitted. A woman recognised us — “you’re the couple from Millionaire!” We felt like Posh and Becks. Sadly (or fortunately) that was the end, rather than the beginning, of our celebrity status.

A couple of months later, we bought our first home, using the £16k winnings as a deposit. In a real sense our very family home began through our appearance that night.

And of course we have regaled the story of our Millionaire adventure ever since.

Someone put all the footage of every Who Wants to be a Millionaire on YouTube a few years ago, and a work colleague tracked our one down more recently (it doesn’t include our grand entrance with Chris for episde 2, but the rest is there). Here it is.

And if you knew immediately who Ludwig Kochel was — do us a favour and keep it to yourself. Noone likes a smart arse.