Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a television game show which offers very large cash prizes for correctly answering successive multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty. The format is owned and licensed by the British production company Celador. more...

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The maximum cash prize (in the original British version) is one million pounds. Most international versions offer a top prize of one million units of the local currency, though the actual value of the prize varies widely, depending on the currency's exchange rate. In at least one country (the United States) the top prizes are no longer cash, but annuities.

The programme originated in the United Kingdom, where it is hosted by Chris Tarrant. It is based on a format devised by David Briggs, who, along with Steve Knight and Mike Whitehill, devised a number of the promotional games for Chris Tarrant's breakfast show on Capital FM radio. The original working title for the show was Cash Mountain. When it first aired in the UK on September 4, 1998, it was a surprising twist on the gameshow genre. Only one contestant plays at a time (similar to some radio quizzes), and the emphasis is on suspense rather than speed. There is no time limit to answer questions, and contestants are given the question before they must decide whether to attempt an answer.

The show is named after Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? , a 1956 song by Cole Porter from the film High Society which emphasised the desirability of love over material possessions: "Who wants to be a millionaire? I don't. / And I don't 'cause all I want is you."

In 2000, a board game based on the hit television series of the same name was released by Pressman Toy Corp.

In March 2006, Celador announced that it was seeking to sell the worldwide rights to the show, together with the UK programme library, as the first phase of a sell-off of the company's format and production divisions. Dutch company 2waytraffic has now acquired Millionaire and the rest of Celador's programme library.

In March 2008,Sony to buy Millionaire firm for £137.5m.

Stage

The show is filmed in front of a studio audience who are arranged in circular tiers around a pit in which the action takes place. At the beginning of each show, the host introduces a group of ten contestants (5 in the Taiwanese version, 6 in the Portuguese, Finnish and Icelandic versions and 8 in the Armenian, Macedonian, Latvian and Nigerian versions), giving their names and where they are from. Each contestant brings along a friend, lover or relative (not to be confused with the phone-a-friend explained later), who sits in the audience and, if the contestant progresses, is periodically shown on camera looking pleased, excited, nervous etc.

Read more at Wikipedia.org