Tuesday, February 4, 2014 at 8:00pm U.K. time will mark Chris Tarrant’s last time saying the iconic catchphrase “Final Answer?” as he will step down from hosting ITV’s long-running hit game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Not only will this be Tarrant’s last hurrah, but the show will be signing off along with its host. For its final episode, the celebrity teams of Olympic cycling legend Sir Chris Hoy (SAMH and UNICEF) and stand-up comedian Kevin Bridges (The Euan MacDonald Centre), TV favorites James Nesbitt and Dom Joly (Child Soldiers International, Save The Children), and "Hairy Biker" Dave Myers (St. Mary’s Hospice)and Strictly Come Dancing co-star Rachel Riley (ALMT) will have one final shot at winning the £1 million jackpot for their respective charities.
Ever since Millionaire hit the U.K. airwaves on September 4, 1998, thanks to its creators Daviid Briggs, Mike Whitehill and Steven Knight, it slowly became an international success. Over 81 countries have adapted the show’s format, including Afghanistan, Denmark and Vietnam, and 39 versions are currently airing to this very day. Although the U.K. version has been on the air for over 15 years, this version has only produced five million-pound winners, excluding the infamous Charles Ingram and the "coughing” scandal. Like Bob Barker on The Price Is Right, Monty Hall on Let’s Make A Deal or Allen Ludden on Password, Chris Tarrant will forever be the face of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (Well, at least in the U.K., anyway). Until next week, let’s briefly step back in time to the year 2000 when Judith Keppel became the show’s first million-pound winner. Check it out in the video below.
With this, "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", IMHO, is truly dead. Yeah, there's still variations of the format still on the air in the United States and Australia, among other countries, but to me, the neither Shuffle Format nor the Hot Seat Format (ESPECIALLY the Hot Seat Format) have the charm of the classic British version, which, although there were some changes to the format throughout the years, still had the spirit of Millionaire in a way until the end (they still had the "classic" lifetimes--50/50, Ask the Audience, Phone a Friend).
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