Who wants to be a Millionaire? cockup

Hairy Homer

Who wants to be a total sucker?

Looks like the RTE version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire screwed up big time AGAIN last weekend. Apparently, a guy was asked a question and given four potential anwers, NONE of which were correct. By great good fortune, he picked the answer that was deemed to be correct but of course it wasn’t really.

The question was: ‘Who co-starred with Cliff Richard in the film Summer Holiday?’ The anwers given were Lulu, Anita Harris, Barbara Winsdor or Adrienne Costa.

In fact, none of these women appeared in the film, a fact that can be checked by going to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)

And of course the computer was to blame.

The production company’s MD Joan Egan explained to the Irish Times:


‘..the programme was driven by two computers - one which lists questions and the other the amounts of money won - and if the two were activated "at the precise same split second" and "they crossed each other" it "sometimes throws the computer selecting the questions out".

She said a "stack" of thoroughly checked questions were ready for each show, but when the computers "crossed each other", as in this instance, a question would be selected for the contestant not from the stack but from a database which had not been thoroughly checked. Normally, however, she said the questions in this database would be correct.

She admitted that the problem had arisen twice on Sunday night's show and once previously, but on the other two occasions the questions selected from the database were correct. It was "extraordinary" that it had happened twice on the last night of the current series.’


The words Yeah and Right spring to mind. Are they seriously trying to tell us that a show that waves in front of potential participants the promise of a 1m euro cheque has its questions delivered by a computer with two unisolated databases? That one of these can be loaded automatically because of interference from another computer? That it takes a separate computer to count from 1 to 1,000,000 in 15 steps?

Wouldn't it be more plausible to suggest that this is just another entirely HUMAN cockup in line with their previous howlers where they have, on more than one occasion, given two potentially correct answers to a question?

In the way that it is run, this show is a disgrace to the Irish viewing public and everybody that legally owns a TV in this country.

Harrumph!!!

seamus

Heh. So they just happened to have 4 answers that would fit? I'm thinking if it was a computer db error, the question would have appeared more like....

q: Who co-starred with Cliff Richard in the film Summer Holiday?
A: a. Madrid b.Barcelona c.Normandy d.Venice.

They can always blame it on the computer, but they can't fool us nerds. When the computers 'crossed' eachother? Yeah good one. Of course most people have never heard of collision or error detection so....

:D

mike65

It might be very slightly exceptable if the question was a really tricky, obtuse one. Anyone can check, as you did Hairy, this sort of question.

Mike.