‘We had therapists on standby': Chris Tarrant on making Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire?
I was responsible for the schedule. I'd listened to Chris Tarrant doing this game on the radio – Double or Quits – which was brilliant. I was intrigued by its TV version, called Cash Mountain, because it was well known in the industry that various people had turned it down. I invited the producer, Paul Smith, to pitch the full idea to me and Claudia Rosencrantz, ITV's controller of entertainment.
My main worry was: how likely was it to bankrupt the network? Four multiple-choice answers seemed too easy. I played the game with Paul in the office, with Claudia as my phone-a-friend, and quickly realised that as the amount of money at stake got higher, more and more doubt crept in. 'We're not going to call it Cash Mountain. I think that's a terrible name,' I said. 'Let's call it Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' It's the title of a song written by Cole Porter for the 1956 film High Society.
I agreed to commission it, so long as we could do a non-broadcast pilot. It was clear that the quiz never really drew to an end: one contestant would win or lose, then another comes on and does the same thing. There was no natural climax. So I thought we should launch it as a strip – on every night – to maximise the drama. Initially I was going to schedule it at 7pm, but I already had Emmerdale working well at five times a week at 7pm, so I decided to go for broke and play it at 8pm, in the hope that the tension of someone potentially winning a million quid would create gripping prime-time drama.
Rather brilliantly, it did very well and became a hit within its first week. Because everyone was talking about it, the ratings got bigger, and we had a phenomenon on our hands. Then the whole world recognised that what was happening in Britain was quite extraordinary – and everybody wanted their own version.
I was at Capital Radio presenting the breakfast show, and also doing the clip show Tarrant on TV. David Briggs, my former producer at Capital, had left to seek his fortune on TV. We'd done a game on the radio called Double or Quits, where your pound doubled with every correct answer. Briggsy said over a lunch one day: 'I'm trying to turn it into a TV format.' I was so bloody busy, up at 5am, I only did the pilot as a favour.
We shot it in July. The producer Paul Smith said: 'It needs more menace.' Composers Keith Strachan and his son Matthew were given 24 hours to rewrite the music, all those stings and 'Da da das …' so we could shoot a second pilot straight away. We knew the prizes had to go up fast. Nobody would say: 'Better not put the kettle on in case somebody wins a quid.' It was my job to add tension. The prize was a cheque, so I'd say: 'We don't want to give you that …'
The pauses were added to really milk the tension. The show was filmed the day before, with rough spots where we needed to break to the adverts. I'd deliberately choose the most dramatic places to cut to commercials, usually between the contestant giving their final answer and me saying whether it was correct. I always wondered if, when the first person played for a million, I'd still have the guts to say: 'We'll take a break.' But I did when Judith Keppel was on her way to winning the first million, and she looked at me like: 'You bastard!'
Briggsy said it was about the shoutabilty: people shouting at the television. My screen didn't show the answer. Even if I did know the answer, I'd taught myself to do this really gormless face, not even raising an eyebrow. I remember one contestant, this really nice guy, a fireman. His £500,000 question was: which of Henry VIII's wives did Holbein paint a portrait of? It's weird what you remember from school. I was thinking: 'For fuck's sake, just say Anne of Cleves.' He didn't answer and settled on £250,000. I'd have bet a million quid I was right.
The press thought winning such high amounts of money would ruin people's lives. We had therapists on standby, but no one who won £500,000 said: 'Take me to my therapist.'
Before the first show, I was in my dressing room with my wife and manager. I said to them both: 'Do you mind giving me 10 minutes?' I must have thought: 'You better take this one seriously, mate. It might go big.'
The Grand Tour had just gone from weekly to two specials a year, freeing up a lot of time. Wayne Garvie, president of Sony Pictures Television and an old mate from the BBC, had worked out he owned the rights to Millionaire, and asked if would I like to host it.
Kevin Lygo, the managing director of ITV Studios, said: 'That sounds like good idea.' I signed on the dotted line right there. We went through a couple of runs on a laptop in my office. Before I knew it, I was learning how to use the Autocue in the TV studios in Manchester. The main problem is that the Autocue is so far away, I've had to start wearing spectacles.
I didn't think I needed to stamp my personality on the show. I thought: 'Chris Tarrant did a pretty good job. I just have to do what he was doing.' One of the new things was the 'Ask the host' lifeline. I don't think there's any shame in not knowing about Greek mythology or tiramisu. Sometimes you luck out. I was asked: 'What was the first American spaceship to orbit the Earth?' I knew it was Friendship Seven, and thought: 'I'm going to look like an absolute genius.' Other times you're asked, 'What's a four-legged animal that barks?', don't know the answer, and feel like an idiot.
Donald Fear is the only person who has won a million on my watch. He was unbelievably cool. The million-pound question was something about pirates that I didn't know, even though I'd just done a programme about pirates, but he knew it was Blackbeard.
I'm supposed to wear hearing aids these days – I'm deaf as well as blind – but people would assume it was an earpiece and I'm feeding people the answers, so I thought I'd better not. These days you can even get spectacles that translate any language in real time. Presumably you could use similar technology to help you answer various questions, but they have an independent adjudicator to spot any anomalies like that. How the coughing thing ever happened was incredible. When you watch it, you think: they must have known something odd was going on.
It's a show I really look forward to. I get up with a spring in my step when I think: 'I'm off to ask people what the capital of Ecuador is.' It's great. I get to sit in a nice, warm chair and make people happy. You can't ask much more than that.
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It's a hot summer's day when I meet Chris Tarrant, and that calls for a drink. As he takes a seat in the plush hotel bar, a waiter comes over and attempts to pour him a glass of iced water. 'Water?' says Tarrant with amusement, as if the server had just proffered a bottle of milk and a Farley's rusk. 'I'll have a beer, thank you very much.' Tarrant has always seemed like a grown-up in the world of broadcasting, even in the custard-pie chaos of Tiswas, the anarchic 1970s children's show. Perhaps it's because he's a physically imposing presence, at 6' 2', or because he started out as a teacher and has a natural authority. He exudes the confidence of a man who has worked in TV and radio for 50 years and made a handsome living from it. Conversing with him is a slightly surreal experience because you recognise every facial expression from his time hosting Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? 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For The Love of Bears is a photo-filled book detailing Tarrant's expeditions to see these magnificent creatures, from coastal brown bears in Alaska to polar bears in the Arctic Circle, including several close encounters. There is one remarkable picture in which a bear ambles past Tarrant as he stands in shallow water in Alaska, barely 10 yards between them. That was on a fishing trip. The title of that chapter is: If A Bear Wants Your Salmon, Let Him Have It. Tarrant's own experiences are interspersed with bear facts and the frequently gory history of human interactions with bears. His first close-up experience occurred during a fishing trip in the extreme north of Russia. He'd enjoyed a drink the night before and decided to have a lie-down on a bed of moss while his companions walked on. He woke up to find a large brown bear staring at him, yet he felt strangely calm. 'Maybe it was the vodka still in my veins. I remember thinking, 'Oh, look, there's a bear.' He looked at me and thought, 'Oh, look, there's a silly little man.' There was no sign of aggression, he just wandered off.' Afterwards, his guide yelled: 'You are a stupid!' at him, which provided the title for another chapter. He thinks now that the fact he was lying down, completely still, probably saved his life. I tell him my theory that everyone has considered what they would do if confronted by a bear – climb a tree, play dead, try to scare it off – despite the minimal chance of us ever encountering one. We put it to the test when the photographer turns up and, sure enough, Geoff has a bear escape plan (he favours making himself look bigger by waving his arms in the air and roaring). Tarrant says there is only one absolute rule: 'Whatever you do, don't run. Because even if they don't mean you any harm, that will spook them. This other thing about climbing a tree? Well, you've got a bloody bear chasing you. You've got seconds. You have to have a tree there, it's got to have all the branches in the right place, and you've got to get 13 feet up because most of them can reach up to 12 feet. And have you climbed a tree since you were 10?' 'Just about every job in television' Tarrant would happily talk about bears all afternoon, but I'm keen also to ask him about how the landscape of TV has changed. When he was honoured for his outstanding contribution at the National Television Awards in 2000, host Sir Trevor McDonald described him as a man who had taken on just about every job in television. In the 1970s, he was a news reporter at ATV in the Midlands, then switched to presenting and producing Tiswas. He brought zany energy to the Capital Radio breakfast show from 1987 to 2004 – the DJ Chris Evans has cited him as an inspiration – and formed a double act with Roland Rat on TV-am. His career reached a peak as the host of Millionaire from its inception in 1998 until 2014, with presenters in 120 other countries copying his catchphrases. Apart from a brief stint at the BBC – so brief he claims not to remember the show he worked on – and a series about railways for Channel 5, Tarrant was an ITV man. But now he thinks the channel is being ruined by adverts. 'We always used to say, 'See you in a couple of minutes,' but how long are the breaks now? Five or six minutes! I watch Netflix and Amazon Prime. Then I turn on an ITV drama and say, 'What? It's only been on three minutes and we've got a break!' And the sponsors and all that. When will it happen that the commercials are longer than the programme?' So he sticks mostly to Netflix, Sky Sports and news bulletins. I ask if he thinks the BBC licence fee is sustainable, and he says that no, it should compete in the marketplace, but he doesn't want to be drawn into the argument. 'It's the last of my worries. I don't think, as I wander about my Bucklebury estate, 'What about the BBC licence fee?'' he jokes. His earnings at Capital and on Millionaire – he was rumoured to be earning £4 million a year at his peak – bought him the lovely house in Berkshire (as a near neighbour of the Middletons), which he shares with Jane Bird, his partner of 20 years. 'I worked like a dog. I'd crawl in at five in the morning to do radio, then at 11am I'd go to Elstree and do Millionaire.' 'Phone a friend' People still shout 'We don't want to give you that' at him in the street, and quip about 'phoning a friend', but the show that inspires the most affection is Tiswas. The show, three hours of live mayhem involving celebrities being covered in gunge and parents being drenched by buckets of water, drew audiences of five million, many of them adults. Co-hosted by Sally James and Lenny Henry, it changed the face of children's TV. Tarrant was driven by the desire to make the show as unlike Blue Peter as possible, with a studio full of kids. Before moving into TV he had spent a year post-university teaching in a tough secondary school in New Cross, south-east London, which stood him in good stead. Was there a real rivalry between him on Tiswas and Noel Edmonds on the BBC's competitor, Multi-Coloured Swap Shop? 'No. There was no contest,' he scoffs. Tarrant writes in his memoir that Swap Shop was a 'drab little Saturday morning offering hosted by Noel Edmonds with his division-four footballers' haircut.' I remind him of that. 'He's still got it as well!' he says of Edmonds' gravity-defying barnet. 'Oh, I'm not going to get involved in Noel. He's resurfaced in New Zealand. I don't quite know what he's done. He's been through several crises. The daftest thing Noel did, when he was dumped from the BBC because those shows were tired, he just wrote abusive letters to the papers slagging off everybody at the BBC except himself. And I thought, Noel, you just don't do that, mate. It's all very well, but you'll never work again.' Schofield, Clarkson and Capital Talk of Edmonds' new comeback show, documenting his lifestyle on New Zealand's South Island, leads us on to Phillip Schofield, who attempted to revive his own career last year by marooning himself on a desert island in Castaway. Tarrant snorts. 'There was not a hint of apology or 'maybe I was a little bit out of order'. Christ Almighty.' He thinks Schofield 'lost the plot' after fame went to his head. 'He was the most over-exposed man ever, maybe apart from [Terry] Wogan at his peak. But Terry was on all the time because he was very good, and funny and likeable, and bright as a button. I loved him. Schofield, they always said, 'Oh, but he's a safe pair of hands.' Did anyone ever say, 'Ooh, it's five to eight, got to get home quick because the safe pair of hands is on?' Dear oh dear. Those shows he did – Dancing On Ice, The Cube, everything – were mainly c--p.' Tarrant thinks that radio people 'are much nicer generally' than TV stars. 'You can get away with stuff on telly when people think you're a wonderful human being because you do 13 weeks a year, you put on your suit and go into this smarmy smile mode. There are people who are not very nice on television who get away with it because they do the image for an hour then go back and scream at everybody in the dressing room. And I do know one or two of them.' Although, now he thinks about it, not everyone on the airwaves is genuine. 'I won't tell you who, but two very high profile presenters on the radio absolutely hate each other. It's a very good, very warm, very bubbly morning show and they do not speak to each other at all while the records are on. Literally. And then it's all, 'Welcome back, ha-ha, hee-hee, ho-ho, it's five past seven.'' The Capital breakfast show was his favourite job, and he remains good friends with members of the team. He has moved on from Millionaire, which he left in 2014 after 15 years. Does he watch it now that Jeremy Clarkson has taken over presenting duties? He stares at me as if I've just fluffed the £100 starter question. 'I never watched it. I've only ever seen two.' But surely he's curious about how Clarkson is doing it? 'No! I haven't watched Clarkson. I know Jeremy, I've known him for years. But I just don't watch game shows.' Not even once, for 10 minutes, in the seven years it's been on? 'No,' he says, as firmly as he says anything during our conversation. 'Why would I? Because I know it so well. And we did have the best of it, the glory days.' Bad press Another thing he doesn't miss is the unions, who wielded enormous power in broadcasting during the 1970s and 1980s. 'I remember going to interview Elton John, who had taken the whole of the Inn on the Park on Park Lane. It was July, really hot, and we had this fantastic lunch with cuts of salmon and all that, loads of champagne. Elton was lovely. And when we got back, unbeknownst to me, they all put in for a broken meal break because we hadn't supplied a hot meal. What? You've just had the best meal of your bloody life!' The people he most enjoyed working for were strong characters who were happy to throw away the rule book. Greg Dyke, who hired him for TV-am and cracked down on the union business, was one. Janet Street-Porter was another. 'I did a year at the BBC with Janet as my boss and she was fantastic. Best boss ever. She was wonderful, so foul-mouthed.' Either Tarrant doesn't hold a grudge, or he didn't read the newspaper column in which Street-Porter delivered a characteristically straight-talking assessment of Tarrant after he confessed to cheating on his second wife, Ingrid, in 2006: 'He's a self-deluded bloke who shagged another woman and was surprised when his wife hired a private detective to find the evidence.' The divorce from Ingrid after a 15-year marriage played out in the tabloids. Tarrant's other bout of bad press occurred in 1999 when a former Capital colleague, Kara Noble, sold a picture to The Sun of Tarrant pulling up the top of the station's PR girl, Sophie Rhys-Jones, to reveal her breasts. It was weeks before Sophie's wedding to Prince Edward. But most of the opprobrium was heaped on The Sun, which was forced to make an apology for printing it, and on Noble for going so low. The public accepted that Tarrant was messing around, and Buckingham Palace never briefed against him. He has said previously that it was a 'pretty stupid' thing to do but that he and the Duchess were simply 'having a giggle'. It's all ancient news now, but left Tarrant with a wariness around journalists. 'I've met Phil Collins a few times and he hates all journalists with a passion. I said to him once, 'Do you remember the names of all the journalists that have stitched you up?' And he said, 'Every single one.' I said, 'I do that. Not every one, but the real bastards.' Enjoying retirement Tarrant doesn't do many interviews now because he retired from TV last year. During the pandemic, 'I thought, I'm actually quite enjoying this life. And now I love it. I still do the odd corporate earner but I wouldn't go back to telly. I spent 50 years of my life in radio or television studios. I've just done so much, I'm sick of the sight of myself. 'Do you know, my dad retired after a long time working hard [Basil Tarrant was a decorated war hero who became a senior executive for the Huntley & Palmer biscuit company] and his mate said to me: 'Keep an eye on your dad because he's always been so busy, he might have a hard time.' Well, Dad lived for another 21 years and he loved it.' Tarrant keeps busy with projects, such as this book, but also goes on lots of holidays, such as taking his two youngest granddaughters on safari. There is a glorious freedom in being able to travel without planning around work schedules, he says. 'I'll tell you the sort of thing. This winter, after Christmas, we went on holiday to the Caribbean for five or six weeks. We got home about mid-February and it was b----y freezing. It went on and on, so I was like, 'F--- this, let's go back again.'' And they did. 'That's called enjoying retirement.' He has six children, including two step-children (his son, Toby, is a DJ for Radio X, while his daughter, Fia, hosts a breakfast show on Heart), and six grandchildren aged three to 13. He is also godfather to a little Ukrainian girl, aged nearly four, whom he took in as a refugee with her mother and grandmother at the start of the war. They lived at his property for a year before he found them a flat in nearby Newbury where they could be nearer to amenities. 'They've enhanced our life. We love them,' he says. The husband is fighting in the Donbas. The family were initially fearful of everything. 'Where I live, there's a little local airport so you get a lot of small planes going over. And they were running indoors – 'It's the Russians!' – and I was saying, 'It's not the Russians, it's just some bloke with a Tiger Moth.' But they were terrified. They just want to go home, but they want to go home and find everything like it was. They won't.' Twelve years ago, he had a mini-stroke during a flight from Bangkok to Heathrow. 'When I'd finally done my physio and all that, I went back to see the specialist and he said, 'You're very lucky, you could have been in a wheelchair.' I asked him what he thought had caused it, and he said, 'Excess.' I said, 'How do you mean?' And he said, 'Excess, excess, excess.' Ah, that'll be the excess then, will it?' He stopped drinking whisky. 'I used to drink a lot of whisky. I haven't had a single drop since I keeled over. And Jane's quite good at keeping me eating healthily. But I can't be vegetarian and all that stuff.' I enquire whether he now has an exercise regime. 'This is it now, talking to you, with a car outside to take me home,' he laughs. 'I'll walk from the car to my front door, and then I shall probably open the bar and turn on Netflix. And, obviously, open my copy of The Telegraph and do the crossword.' Sounds perfect, I say. 'Yeah,' he grins, and never has a man looked so content with the lifestyle he's earned.
