I did find that the format of Millionaire was very good to watch.
I will miss Chris Tarrant after the show is ended. He has been a great ambassador to the show since it's foundation on ITV. I think that it's refresh to the current format is very modern for it's time which was needed. I was getting tired of the old format as it was getting too dated.
I used to be watching it every night when I was a kid when the first series began and I enjoyed it throughly.
The £50k safety net didn't really work either. Gambling £64k to win £125k and risk going down to £32k made for much better TV than gambling £75k to win £125k or go down to £50k.
I wonder how much the million pound jackpot was a factor in it's success. UKGameShows.com actually says the jackpot was reduced to £1m as it was a more aspirational amount than the higher £5,242,880 initially considered (20 questions doubling from £10 for Q1).
The £50k safety net didn't really work either. Gambling £64k to win £125k and risk going down to £32k made for much better TV than gambling £75k to win £125k or go down to £50k.
The theory behind that was they thought people would be more willing to gamble at 75K because they could double their money but only lose a third of it. Didn't quite work though - £25,000 is still a lot of money to lose!
Actually I seem to recall a lot of people seemed to have a gamble when they got to £75,000. Trouble was after they changed the format most people didn't get past £20,000.
Tonight's live episode is the last one ever to be made, the other two that will be shown in February have already been recorded. I believe they are also celebrity shows though.
So tonight's Chris's last ever time in the Millionaire studio, but oddly he wont be able to acknowledge that fact.
I've not watched Millionaire much since the 12 question change. When I seen this/the clock versions elsewhere in the world, I thought if the UK took it, it would be the death nail for it. When the clock version came into the UK it was ok, of what I have seen, but for me (call me traditional) but the 15 question format was the best. Maybe just adding in the switch after £32,000 would have been the only change.
Another thing, I think Millionaire was always going to 'decline/erode' from the boom ratings early on. What I felt that maybe didn't help Millionaire was that it in the mid-2000s it seemed to never be off the box. In early days it ran for 6-8 weeks at a time then had a break.