Small payouts still attract big audiences

Last Tuesday even Gay Byrne seemed exasperated

Last Tuesday even Gay Byrne seemed exasperated. The show may be called Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but the most any of the contestants came away with was £4,000.

The veteran broadcaster even broke out of his quizmaster mode and helped one contestant who was taking his time deciding who the Vestal Virgins were. "Well, you know they didn't sell ice cream, so that's D gone," he said, before eliminating another option. The contestant eventually hit on the right £200 answer, but it was a long business.

While Byrne may appear to have been breaking the rules, he wasn't. The Millionaire manual devised by Celador, the programme's owner, allows the host to joke with and even help contestants during the first three questions if it's going to put them at their ease.

The apparent simplicity of the questions and the low payout were hot topics, with a heated phone-in on Gerry Ryan's radio programme the following day. There were suggestions that if someone didn't push the prize money into six figures, the show could lose its appeal.

READ MORE

However, low payouts don't seem to put viewers off. Some 900,000 tuned in for the 7.30 p.m. WWTBAM last Tuesday, according to RTE, and more than one million watched the second segment.

It's been the same since the programme started. Hype and novelty brought in over 1.2 million viewers in the first week, but even four weeks later the figures consistently hover around one million.

The show's producers aren't worried that the low level of winning might damage viewership because it hasn't happened in other markets; £259,000 has been won in the first four weeks here, with no one taking home more than £64,000. That's more than the British version gave out in its first six weeks. The feeling in Celador and in Tyrone Productions is that it's the "scream at the screen" factor that keeps viewers, not the money.

The contestants in Ireland have been, with few exceptions, male. The ratio of one or two women for every 10 men on the panel is the same as in Britain. About 50,000 wannabe millionaires phone in every week, and numbers haven't dipped since the show started. This is despite the impression that Byrne's more frequent urgings for people to phone in might indicate.

A spokesman for Eircell, the programme's sponsor, said Byrne was repeating the "please phone" mantra more often because the sponsor wanted more mentions, rather than any fall-off in numbers.

In Britain, viewership of WWTBAM has dropped from 72 per cent for its first few programmes to around 50 per cent, but the drop took over two years, and a 50 per cent rating is still high. Ireland's interest in the programme looks like following that pattern. It started with 74%per cent and now hovers in the mid60s, with no sign of a fall-off.