NO CONTEST
By Matthew Engel
Guardian, January 25, 1999 

For most of the past fortnight, up to 18 million people (according to the Sun, which would never lie to me) have been watching an ITV quiz programme at eight o'clock each evening called Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? That figure represents a third of the British population.

We have here something very close to that mystical event which has supposedly disappeared except when charismatic princesses die spectacularly, or the England football team performs modestly at the World Cup: the shared national experience.

The Sun sponsors this programme, so it is even more biased than usual, and the announcer actually calls the show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire With The Sun? which sounds a little less enticing to those of a sensitive disposition. But its success is unquestionable. There are good reasons for this.

Firstly it is January when telly and the fireside are attractive options. Secondly, there is damn all else on the other channels. Thirdly, avarice of a pathetic and hopeless sort is the prime obsession of the British public. And fourthly, the programme - introduced by Chris Tarrant - is actually very well done, complete with sound and lighting effects straight from the last reel of the more stylish kind of thriller.

Contestants have to answer up to 15 questions, starting at £100 and going up to a theoretical million, which no one has even approached, although with those sort of ratings even a million is nothing to the TV companies. There are extra wrinkles: people get one chance to "phone a friend" (amazingly, they always seem to be in) and "ask the audience". But essentially this is a programme as old as commercial TV. It was an idea that started in the US as The 64,000 Dollar Question, and was most successfully transplanted to Britain as Double Your Money, with Hughie Green.

This was a staple of the British Thursday evening from 1955, when ITV began, until 1968. In those innocent days, the top prize was a mere £1,000, an amount Tarrant's contestants can only miss by carelessness or idiocy. Hughie would ask a nice soft one to let people have a quid, but then the questions got harder and harder. And after £32 the poor saps were put in a soundproof box and asked serious specialist stuff.

You were not allowed any of that Mastermind nonsense, with specialisms so narrow they can quickly be mugged up - The Works of Dick Francis, 1987-88. These were proper subjects: "English literature" or "classical music". I don't remember anyone winning the grand, but I have a vivid memory of an early foodie who got to £500 and blew it all because he panicked for a second and said "ananas" was French for banana rather than pineapple.

This Monday, a student at Swansea University won £16,000, having correctly divined, from four alternatives, the definition of kleptomania. In the 1960s this might have been put to an 11-year-old on Top of the Form (kleptomania being a traditional specialism of 11-year-olds).

I think this counts as an illustration of dumbing down. But a more dramatic impression of what has happened to British TV comes from a study of the schedules. Forty years ago ITV was already regarded by the bien-pensants as a bit of an interloper; an engine for idiocy. But on Thursday, January 15, 1959, Double Your Money at 8pm was followed by the current affairs programme This Week. And later - great treat - came Murder Bag, with Raymond Francis as Detective Superintendent Lockhart.

The following day, there was the other grand ITV quiz show - Take Your Pick, with Michael Miles ("You didn't nod your head, did you?"). Then came that splendid old comedy The Army Game and a production of Private Lives. The pioneer pop programme Cool For Cats was at 11 - just before the Epilogue.

Of course, nostalgia lends a certain enchantment to black-and-white programmes which were live and rickety. But compare that to the kind of stuff which followed Chris Tarrant this week. On Monday, there was Carol Vorderman's Better Homes, a programme for those besotted with property prices; on Tuesday, Airline, a cheapskate docu-soap about a cheapskate company; on Wednesday, Police Camera Action, a programme celebrating the way in which our friendly neighbourhood bobbies spy on us. All this drivel was on at 8.30 in the evening, not three in the morning.

There is now more creativity in the average primary school art class than in a month of programming on ITV. It has become a network for cretins, which is why a decently cretinous programme like Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? stands out. News At Ten survives, for a little while longer; but for years it has been the old lady in the rent-controlled top floor flat. They have kept shoving excrement through the letter-box to force her out, and now at last she is under notice.

The catastrophe that has befallen ITV is merely part of the tragedy which constitutes modern British broadcasting. It is merely the most devastated part of the wasteland. But why on earth did we let it happen?