‘We knew the prize money had to go up fast. No one would say, “Better not put the kettle on in case somebody wins a quid”’
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.
