Fastest Finger Millionaires

So “Fastest Finger First” ended. You know if you read my review earlier this week that I really liked it. Not everyone did, and I understand that. I liked the quickfire pace, others found it a bit repetitive. I liked it that we didn’t use a lot of time getting to know the contestants, others felt this was a bit of a drawback. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinions.

I did say that I would rather watch “Fastest Finger First” than the proper Millionaire show. That’s true. Now, you might well say “Well, that’s because you made such a pig’s ear of your own appearance on the show in 2006.” And if I’m honest, there’s at least a grain of truth in that. But it isn’t just that. As I think I’ve already said, I prefer to watch shows where more questions are asked and less time is taken talking to contenders. So it may come as a bit of a surprise that I did actually watch last night’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. To be precise I watched it this morning on playback. Why? I’ll tell you. I wanted to see if the contenders were going to be the winners of “Fastest Finger First”, and how they would get on.

So FFF has boosted the ratings of the parent show. By how many, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have watched it if it wasn’t for FFF. My reckoning was that in order to win a show of FFF you have to have some quiz ability, and so potentially we could see large amounts of wedge being won. Well, only three contestants got to play last night, and both of them were winners of FFF. Sadly, neither of them was Port Talbot’s John McKenna, whom I particularly want to see, and hope that he does well. Last night Helen, the first, bailed out with the very tidy sum of a quarter of a million pounds, the second, Awaiz took £32,000. Very nice thank you. Natalie, the third, only had time to walk to the chair.

While watching it did strike me that the two shows don't necessarily reward the same skills. Once you're in the Millionaire chair speed of response is no longer an issue. Being able to use what you do know to help you figure out what you don't and being able to use your lifelines to the best effect - there are far more important. Looking at the level of the average question on FFF, they're not generally as difficult as the 'real money' questions on Millionaire. So winning FFF is no guarantee that you'll do well on Millionaire. In practice though I'd say that the winners are demonstrably more likely to do well than the average FFF contestant who didn't win. 

I have to say that Jeremy Clarkson makes a better fist of presenting the show than I thought he would. I just didn’t quite see this as being in his wheelhouse. Having said that, there is more to the man than meets the eye, as anyone who’s either read his book about Diddly Squat farm or watched the TV series knows.

I’ll tell you one thing that intrigues me. We’ve got another one, or maximum one and a half shows, and then we’ve used up the five FFF winners. So :-

·       Does this series of Millionaire end when we run out of FFF winners? (Surely not.)

·       Does this mean that Fastest Finger comes back next week? No, I don’t think it does?

·       Does this mean that once the five winners have had their goes we go back to the random selection from the ten qualifiers? I guess so.

Well, there we are. I shall watch the next, and I’ll keep watching until the guy from Port Talbot has been on. Then that’ll be it for me.