Game show contestants will do almost anything to get their hands on the cash, as Shane Hegarty discovers
It has been an interesting week for TV game shows, although the suspense has occurred off-screen. Tecwen Whittock, Maj Charles Ingram and his wife, Diana, were convicted of cheating their way to the top prize in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? through a code of coughs that the judge described as a "shabby schoolboy trick". Meanwhile, gardaí announced that they would seek the extradition of Irishman Michael Furlong from the UK. Facing charges connected to the road death of a teenage girl in Carlow last year, he allegedly fled Ireland only to reappear on Channel 4's Boys and Girls a fortnight ago - winning £150,000.
Neither, however, are the first quiz show scandals. The most infamous remains that of Twenty-One, later immortalised by the movie Quiz Show. In 1957, the show's producers, under pressure due to flagging ratings, rigged games so that handsome academic Charles van Doren played a series of exciting ties with reigning champion Hubert Sempel. Finally "victorious", van Doren went on a month-long winning streak, amassing $138,000 and making the cover of Time magazine, all the while being fed the answers. After Sempel went to the newspapers, a government investigation led to the suspension of TV quiz shows.
Subsequent attempts at cheating have included the New Zealanders who last year took beta-blockers to win game show The Chair, in which success depends on maintaining a low heart-rate while being bombarded with general knowledge questions.
In the UK, meanwhile, the 1997 Fifteen To One champion, Trevor Montague, was forced to hand back a fifth-century Greek vase, valued at £3,000, because, contrary to the rules, he had appeared on the show before. After first taking part in 1990, he had also returned two years later, with hair slicked back and an earring, as Italian Steve Romana.
However, unprecedented prize money has meant that Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has proved a magnet for controversy. In 2001, when a contestant on Qui veut gagner des millions? became the first Frenchman to claim the top prize there were accusations of a fix. On the final question, the audience had guessed correctly that Dr Rotule had tended to Captain Haddock in the Tintin stories, although the character was named only once throughout 22 books.
Here, the show went through a protracted saga after a contestant, Shane O'Doherty, was wrongly eliminated. The lunula, he had answered for £125,000, is a part of the heart. No, said the show, it's part of the fingernail. Wrong, retorted the medical textbooks. O'Doherty was invited back on the show, with the choice of continuing the quiz or taking the £125,000. He took the money.
In the US, a contestant who walked away with only $1,000 attempted to sue broadcaster ABC for more than $1 million in damages after claiming that he had been asked a misleading question. Asked "What capital city is located at the highest altitude above sea level?", he argued that the world's highest - La Paz - had not been among the options given. In the UK, the show's makers, Celador, last year donated £32,000 to charity after mistakenly ruling that Desmond Lynam and Mary Nightingale had answered incorrectly during a celebrity edition of the show.
Because they are National Lottery-backed games of chance rather than skill, Ireland's highest-rated game shows, Winning Streak and Fame and Fortune, are surrounded by extraordinary levels of security. For those games in which balls are selected or wheels spun, the machines are checked regularly to ensure they are selecting at random. The size and shape of the balls are tested.
The machines are double-locked in an RTÉ room when not in use. Where a computer uncovers the prizes - as in Winning Streak's Treasure Island game, for instance - sophisticated protocols are enforced to ensure that the outcome cannot be predicted in advance. Finally, every three months, the results of previous shows are sent to the statistics department of Trinity College Dublin, where researchers look for possible patterns to the play .
According to Ray Bates, director of the National Lottery, there has not yet been cause to halt a game show.
"Even if I really seriously tried, I would not be able to get at these machines," he says. "Even if I used the best and most crooked minds available."
By the way, the next big idea is Play for a Billion, a US show in which 1,000 people will compete for $1 million. The winner will then have the chance to win $1 billion in a lottery - with those numbers picked by a monkey.
No amount of coughing is likely to affect that outcome.