Who Wants To Be A Millionaire to end

I'm pretty sure by then it was past it's peak and only on about once a week.


In the very early days it was stripped nightly for a couple weeks every few months, than it had longer series over about 3 nights a week. Before eventually ending up on just Saturday then Tuesday nights.

I think ITV probably played Millionaire about right, milked it when it was massive, kept it plodding along whilst it was still doing the business and giving it a boast in it's final few years with the live celebrity episodes.

Yeah, for the first two years it was stripped for only a few weeks, the first run lasted Friday to the following Sunday and it was never longer than two weeks. The stripped daily runs were in September 1998, January 1999, March 1999, September 1999, November 1999, January 2000 and April 2000. It had huge value in those days as something to launch shows off the back of, the March 1999 run accompanied the revamped schedules when the news moved from ten to eleven, and the November 1999 run was part of a mad week on ITV when they had Emmerdale five nights a week (when it wasn't usually) plus the Brighton-set Corrie spin-off at 10pm every night, just to pull in huge audiences in the run-up to Christmas. It was very much like I'm A Celebrity in those days in terms of when and how it was shown, to create maximum impact. They'd put it wherever required as well, in two halves around England vs Scotland, as a spoiler opposite Winning Lines (at exactly the same time and duration) and so on.

From the autumn of 2000 it was shown a couple of times a week, every week, which is when the novelty wore off a bit. In about 2002 it went down to just once a week on Saturday nights for nine months of the year or so.

There are two more recorded for airing in February, as I was in the audience for one yesterday - Great experience and really interesting seeing it from the studio point of view, especially how some of the retakes that Chris had to do will actually be edited for the final transmission.

It felt like the live version was a lot better than the previous versions that they've done.

Really? I only tuned in at 10, expecting News At Ten, and it looked a right mess.

I think that's because it was live and they were running out of time to get Kian and Rebecca up the money ladder. It started off at ok at the start, but got a bit out of hand at the end...