Me - I Want To Be A Millionaire! (part 3)

It felt very strange to be stepping onto that familiar set. I had been in TV studios before and had often been surprised by how shabby the sets looked at close quarters – an inevitable consequence of being continually packed away into storage and re-erected. Not so with the Millionaire set, now permanently located on Stage 9 at Elstree. Its state-of-the-art computer consoles, brushed chrome and vertigo-inducing perspex floor look every bit as pristine and hi-tech in reality as they do on screen.

Before the rehearsal could get under way, we first had to line up in front of the camera and hold up our preferred outfits for the show to ensure that these would be acceptable. (Not on taste grounds, but simply because some colours and patterns can cause distortions or other unpleasant effects on screen.) That done, our approved clothing was taken away to be steam-pressed and returned to our dressing rooms.

The show’s producer, David Briggs, then welcomed us all and familiarised us with our ‘fastest finger’ consoles. The concept is simple: arrange four answers to a question by pressing buttons marked A, B, C and D in the right order, followed by the green ‘enter’ button. There is also a red ‘clear’ button to press if you make a mistake and want to start again – but only before you press green. Pressing the green button logs your time and locks out your console from further presses. David’s principal advice was ‘accuracy before speed’. In other words, it’s no use trying to hit the buttons as fast as possible if you get the answer wrong; better to sort out the right order in your head first, then press the buttons. And, whatever you do, remember to press green! This, incidentally, explains why so few contestants appear to answer the simplest questions (like ‘arrange these four words in alphabetical order’) correctly – they press the buttons so fast that, in their excitement, they forget to press green and so no time is logged.

We had three or four goes at answering a fastest finger question, and it was here that I began to get a sinking feeling. Whatever snap judgements I may have made about my fellow contestants up until now, we were clearly a very evenly matched group. I answered all my practice questions correctly – but not once did I manage it in the fastest time. Getting into that hot seat was going to be no pushover. I just hoped that we would have as many chances as possible to do so in the hour-long show, which very much depends on how far each successful contestant makes it up the ladder of fifteen possible questions.

Next, David Briggs took the host’s chair and invited each of us in turn to sit in the hot seat and play a couple of questions just as we would for real. Although this is done very much as you see on TV, with the lights, music and so on, the atmosphere is relaxed and there is much laughter – particularly when someone decides to ‘phone a friend’ and one of the production team comes on the line in the guise of the contestant’s ‘Auntie Edna’. It was while David was giving the contestant before me a Tarrantesque grilling (‘Are you sure? Are you confident? Is that your final answer?’) that a voice from the gloom called out, ‘Oh, get on with it!’ and a familiar figure stood up – Chris Tarrant himself, casually dressed and sipping a can of Coke, having just arrived from presenting his morning show on Capital FM. ‘Come on, then, show us how it’s done,’ said David, and Chris ambled on set and took the chair.

It was my turn in the hot seat, and Chris asked me where I was from. When I told him, his face lit up. ‘Leamington Spa? I know it well. I was once made an honorary member of the Warwickshire Angling Club – I used to go fishing on the Leam at Offchurch.’ He struck me, both at rehearsals and after the show when he socialised freely with contestants, as a genuinely ordinary, unpretentious, down-to-earth bloke who just happens to host the most successful game show in the history of television – and is no doubt a very wealthy man because of it.

And so it was that I found myself in the situation I described in Part 1 of this article – answering a £32,000 question from Chris Tarrant. I got it right too. The lights came up, the music swooped, the audience applauded, Chris held out the cheque, and I followed the instructions given by the floor manager and held it in position for the camera. Shame it was just a rehearsal, and the cheque was a dummy (made out to ‘A. Contestant’). But my sense of achievement was real.

Rehearsal over, it was into the canteen for dinner before returning to the dressing room. There wasn’t a great deal of time left before we would be called down to the studio at 7pm, and both Marc and I needed to shower, shave and change.

But first, I had to contact all my phone-a-friends to make sure they were ready, and to read them a list of rules. I had to tell them that they must:

• keep their phone line free between 7pm and 10pm
• let the phone ring at least five times before answering
• not say their phone number when they answer
• not confer with anyone else in the room.