Concept Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? £5m Edition

[Kyng]

Back in the day, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? offered the highest prizes on television anywhere in the world (£1 million on the UK edition). But, since then, it's been upstaged: in 2012, Red or Black? gave away a £1.5 million prize, and in 2023, Squid Game: The Challenge gave away a prize of $4.56 million (roughly equivalent to £3.63 million). So, how does Millionaire reclaim its crown? Here's how!

1. The Money Tree

If we're increasing the top prize to £5 million, then that requires a change in the money tree . And, my proposal is that, instead of 15 questions, the contestants would have to answer 20 questions - which would be worth the following prizes:

1. £100
   
2. £200
   
3. £300
   
4. £500
   
5. £1,000
   
6. £2,000
   
7. £4,000
   
8. £8,000
   
9. £16,000
   
10. £32,000
    
11. £64,000
    
12. £125,000
    
13. £250,000
    
14. £500,000
    
15. £1,000,000
    
16. £1,500,000
    
17. £2,000,000
    
18. £2,500,000
    
19. £3,500,000
    
20. £5,000,000
    

There would be three 'safety nets', at which point the player's money would be banked. The first would be at £1,000; the second would be at £32,000; and the third would be at any point the contestant chooses after that.

2. The Questions

Since I'm empathetic, and I don't want to bankrupt ITV by forcing them to give away £5 million prizes every other week, I wouldn't be making it easy for the contestants. I'd start out with the standard "4 possible answers, 1 correct" system - but from the £1 million question onwards, I would increase the number of possible answers... and from the £2.5 million question onwards, I'd really stick the knife in by requiring them to give more than one correct answer:

• Questions 1-14: 4 possible answers, 1 correct
  
• Question 15 (£1m): 5 possible answers, 1 correct
  
• Question 16 (£1.5m): 5 possible answers, 1 correct
  
• Question 17 (£2m): 6 possible answers, 1 correct
  
• Question 18 (£2.5m): 6 possible answers, 2 correct
  
• Question 19 (£3.5m): 7 possible answers, 2 correct
  
• Question 20 (£5m): 7 possible answers, 3 correct

So, an example of a £5,000,000 question on this show would be as follows:

Which three of the following chemical elements take their names from European capital cities?
A) Erbium
B) Hafnium
C) Hassium
D) Holmium
E) Lutetium
F) Palladium
G) Rhenium

In order to win the money, the contestant would have to give the answer: B, D, and E (Hafnium is named after Copenhagen; Holmium is named after Stockholm; and Lutetium is named after Paris). No partial credit for only getting one or two of these: it'd be all or nothing!

3. The Lifelines

Here's one area where I'll be a little nicer to the contestants. They start out with their four usual lifelines (50/50, Phone a Friend, Ask the Audience, Ask the Host) - but, some of these would be a bit different for the later questions:

• 50/50 would eliminate two wrong answers at any point where it's used (so, for example, using the 50/50 on the £1 million question would leave the player with the right answer and two wrong answers). Because of this, the lifeline would be re-named to something like "Minus Two".
  
• If the Phone a Friend is used on anything past the £1 million question, the phone call lasts for 60 seconds, instead of 30 (to give extra time to read out all the answers). And if it's used on the £5 million question, the phone call lasts for 90 seconds (to give the friend extra time to think, and then list the three correct answers).

Also, since those four lifelines aren't going to cut it on their own (I mean, I can't see Jeremy Clarkson being very helpful with the etymologies of chemical elements), two further lifelines would become available later on in the game:

• Switch - Becomes available from the £64,000 question onwards. Allows the contestant to replace any question with another one of the same value;
  
• How Many Right? - Becomes available from the £2,500,000 question onwards (i.e. for the multi-part questions). The contestant takes an initial guess at which two (or three) answers are the correct ones. If they are right, they win the money; if they are wrong, the host tells them how many answers they got right (but not which ones).

4. The Music

Of course, we'd need special music for the later questions . The music for the first 14 questions would be the same as in the normal show... but then, from question 15 onwards, we'd have increasingly intense versions of the music from question 14. Someone on YouTube has put together an example of what this would sound like (for questions 11-20):



Yeah, this is starting to feel like "Millionaire's Evil Big Brother", where the contestants have this music playing in the background, while they're having to give multiple correct answers to each question . But hey, with £5 million at stake, I wasn't going to make it easy for them !

So, any thoughts, or anything else you'd add?