I have spent some time in Los Angeles over the years and on one of my trips I arrived back to my hotel room just in time to see an episode of Who Wants to Be Millionaire with Regis Philbin. When I turned on the TV, the contestant had reached $500.00. In the next 15 minutes he proceeded to answer every question correctly before reaching the Million Dollar question. He spent a minute or two pondering the options and answered a question on astronomy correctly to actually win One Million Dollars. This all occurred in the space of about twenty minutes and was slick and dramatic TV.

 

Had this been the Australian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, the same contestant would have taken 2 or even 3 programmes to get to the same result while Eddie McGuire continually asked inane questions in a boring attempt to "humanise" the contestant. He would have most definitely delayed the answers to the questions so that he could "tease" the audience with "We will find out if he has the right answer after the break".

 

Booring.

 

The producers of the programme in Australia seem to have the mistaken impression that dragging out the time taken to answer the questions creates suspense and drama. In reality they are producing a crashing boor of a programme that should have been a guaranteed success if they had just let the format do its job without the "human interest" garbage.

 

Here is a clue for the programmers: The viewers want to see how much the contestant can win and they really dont care about the personal lives of the contestants. They can find that out later when New Idea interviews the successful ones.

 

Eddie McGuire rose to great heights as quiz and footy show host and eventually became Chief Executive of Channel 9, no less, before reverting back to a mere quiz show host. There is no doubt that he has now become passé and his career is on the wane.

 

It is probably too late for Eddie now but he should have watched episodes of the British or US versions of Who Wants to be A Millionaire with Chris Tarrant and Regis to see how it should have been done. The show is not about the host. Its all about seeing who can win a million bucks.....

 

......and that leads me to my theory that any number of run of the mill presenters could have successfully hosted this show. All they need was to ask the questions and let the format do the work. But maybe that is just too complicated......