The National Lottery: Break The Safe

The big red button is just for show. You can see an official starting up the machine's themselves if the camera cuts away too early.

[sanity needed]

Nearly twenty years on from the launch of the lottery, surely everyone knows by now that the lottery numbers are drawn at the end of the programme. Always have been, always will be, so just tune in ten minutes before the end.

The reason they usually (but don't always, there are several weeks in the year when they have just the individual draw shows) wrap them around a quiz is because the lottery on its own gets very low ratings. It's wrong to say that people just want the numbers, when it's shown on its own it's often the lowest rated thing on BBC1 every evening. It's also incorrect to say that the viewers sit through the whole show just to wait for the results, because some of the quizzes get high ratings and some of them don't, and the ones that don't (Millionaire Manor, The People's Quiz) are no longer with us. When it's Who Dares Wins I watch the whole thing because I like it. When it's In It To Win It I generally don't, I just switch on towards the end.

And of course on Wednesdays they do just give out the numbers and that's it, because the actual draw itself rated badly.

The machines that the National Lottery use are internationally renowned for their quality and compliance to standards - all machines are tested comprehensively. Each draw has an independent adjudicator to spot anything unscrupulous. The balls have RFID devices to identify them, and are meticulously designed.

This sort of conspiracy speculation should be confined to the David Icke forums.

Didnt one of the doors fly open once?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I remember the machine failed in 1996 and it put the draw back an hour, that was back in the Bob Monkhouse era...

I seem to recall that in the days when the lottery was a big deal and it was a big audience draw, they always made it in a longer programme because 15 minutes was the minimum length for a programme to be counted for the ratings

Yes, because John Willain forgot to close the door properly, the silly sod. There were a few occasions when the old Thunderball machine broke and failed to choose the Thunderball so they had to have another go.

The thing about fixing it is that the aftermath if someone found out they were doing it would be enormous. It's ages ago now but when they did The Big Ticket, that crappy scratchcard-related game nobody liked, they had a special lottery for people who bought the cards and in the first week there was some sort of cock-up, I think the wrong ball was identified, and even though this wasn't obvious on screen and nobody watching would have noticed, Camelot still announced there was a mistake, put ads in all the papers and said that you'd win if you matched either the ball they'd incorrectly read out or the one it actually was, which cost them loads more money. When they could have completely covered it all up. So after going to all those lengths when nobody noticed, why fix it? They'd have to pay out loads of compensation, Camelot would lose their licence and nobody would play it again.

Same as when people used to say the midweek one was always pre-recorded and they were lying when they said it was live, yet they always specifically said on air when, for whatever reason, a draw was recorded earlier.

As for the duration of the show, if that was ever the case it certainly isn't any more, a show needs to be five minutes long to count in the ratings.

They lost under the old rules and then when given another chance to win under the new rules they lost. Just a couple of bitter losers if you ask me.

Sold their story so not total losers I guess.

If it did it probably wasn't as dramatic as this:

I don't think it's a mistake. You have always been able to see John Willan or one of his children pressing the real button behind Tony Bullimore or whoever is pressing the prop button that week. This is despite changes in sets, studios and productions companies over the years. I wonder if Camelot require that the programme shows the real start of the draw. It would be a mistake to try to hide it IMHO, these things have to be whiter than white. Something the BBC should have considered when redoing the Break The Safe endgame.