Unlimited Win

Look, I have nothing against Ant and Dec. I think that they are very talented presenters. I have never tried to present a TV show myself, but I am pretty certain that it is a very difficult job to do. When you see just how long they have been at the top of the tree, and look at the wide range of very different shows they have presented then it all goes to show, they are very, very good at the job they do. But there’s the rub. Ant and Dec, with their collective metaphorical cupboard bulging with best awards for being the best hosts on the box, are very much ITV’s A Team. So, when I saw that they were presenting ‘Unlimited Win’ my thoughts were – ITV must have high hopes for this if they’re presenting it. Which means it will be big, bold and spectacular, and trying to appeal to a mass, lowest common denominator audience, which really isn’t my cup of tea at all.

It’s not as bad as I feared. The gimmick behind the show is that there is no final jackpot. Players can keep building the jackpot, well into the tens of millions. If they’re good enough. Of course, that just isn’t going to happen in a month of Sundays. Or Saturdays.

It does seem to me that all of ITV’s eggs are in the basket marked ‘potential prize beyond the dreams of avarice’. Don’t knock it. You could argue that this was what made “Millionaire” an overnight smash, all those years ago. But Millionaire had other things going for it, not the least of which was the fact that if you rang in and answered a question correctly, you could soon be on the show yourself. There was also the lifelines too, which added interest. But that was then. This is now.

The game play is, to be honest, pretty simple. It’s one of those shows where contestants not playing against each other. A pair comes on – they may be friends, or sisters, or whatever. Our hosts ask them a timed set of questions to determine how many lives they start with. Okay. Then they are asked the first question. These always have a numerical answer If they get the answer spot on they win the first amount of cash - £2500 I think. If their answer is less than the correct answer, then they can play on but they lose lives, to the tune of the number out they are. So if the answer is 10 and you answer 7, you lose three lives. Once the lives run out, it’s game over. If the answer they give is greater than the correct answer, then they also leave with nothing. Once they are past the first amount of money, they start to play for the second. It really is that simple.

On the show I watched, the first question is a gimme – for example, how many words are in the version of Humpty Dumpty in the show I watched. Yeah, you probably don’t know it – I didn’t, but you can work it out. Just count them up, and that’s what the contestants did. After that, though, it gets harder. I’m trying to remember some of them, but they weren’t the sort of thing you are going to necessarily know. For example, how many years is it since Take That had their first hit single. Early 90s, yes, but oh, so easy to go over. Which means you deliberately underestimate in the hope of getting one you can answer spot on. And it’s on this level that the show works, and has a level of interest.

I watched it with my oldest daughter. The first couple on our show were friends, I think, and with a large total in the bank, instead of cashing in they locked in an answer with only a very small number of lives left. They lost and left with nowt. My daughter shouted at the telly how stup0id they were to do so, totally ignoring the fact that I threw away £15,000 on Millionaire once. The lure of all that cash does strange things to you. Which is, I suppose, another appeal.

Will it catch on. Look, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. We’ve done the mind-bogglingly awesome amounts of cash thing before. And with “Millionaire” although it took years for anyone to win a million, it always looked possible. Because the questions, while you might not know the answers, were fair GK questions. Just look at the questions that Judith had to answer for a million and you’ll see what I mean. With the game mechanics of this show, I can’t see anyone winning a truly awesome amount of cash. But then, what do I know? Not enough to win more than £1000 on Millionaire, that’s for pretty damn sure.