TV NEWS AND GOSSIP
New Tarrant show not for the faint-hearted
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Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? may have got a few pulses racing – but Chris Tarrant’s new game show The Colour of Money is apparently so stressful, potential contestants are asked to have ECG tests beforehand to ensure they aren’t going to keel over midway through the programme.
“We designed the show to be stressful but we’d no idea people would react like this,” said an insider. “It’s really tense. It’s also really, really hard and Chris loves winding his contestants up, just like on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? He’s the king of tension.”
The programme features 20 coloured ATM machines, each containing a different and unknown amount of money. As we understand it, contestants are given a cash target and must monitor each machine – which will count up in units of £1,000 – one by one, saying stop when they want to collect. But if the counter on the machine reaches its upper limit, contestants will get nothing. On the other hand, if they say stop too early, they won’t hit their target – in which case they go home empty-handed.
“It’s all or nothing,” explained Tarrant. “It’s brutal.” But the show doesn’t just leave the contestants with racing hearts, added the presenter. This one makes people cry. “On Millionaire, we have done 600 shows, and I can think of only two or three contestants who cried,” said the star.
“On Colour of Money, we have had 18 contestants, and 16 burst into tears. It’s quite extraordinary. This bloody machine keeps going, and you see every emotion. It’s almost primal.”
He added: “When we finish filming, we’re absolutely battered. We come off and say, ‘What the hell was that?’ My reservation is whether or not that comes through the screen, but I think it does.”
We’ll find out if he’s right when the programme airs on Saturday 21 February (ITV1). Let’s hope they’ve got a paramedic or two on standby…
by Will Parkhouse, Monday 9 February 2009
Source: The Sun, The Times
Picture: ITV
