IT has been 14 years since Ingram Wilcox became the last person to take home the top prize on ITV juggernaut Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
But after a revamp, and a new host, it might be time for the novelty cheque department to finally earn their keep.
Jeremy Clarkson, who in 2018 replaced Chris Tarrant as the presenter for the reboot to mark 20 years of the classic quiz show, says the new series has a moment that no viewer will want to miss.
In an exclusive interview, ahead of the show’s return on Sunday, Jeremy teased: “I wouldn’t want to do a spoiler, but there is one of those precious moments, not just in the show’s history but I’d say if you look across all of television.
“There are occasionally moments that you go, ‘Christ, I remember that’. And there is one coming up in this series — a truly brilliant, brilliant bit of television.
“I mean, I was just bowled over. The old tear ducts were welling up. I won’t say any more than that but it is very good television.”
The closest anyone has got to joining the list of five previous jackpot winners was last year, when Birmingham schoolteacher John Robinson got to the final question but sensibly decided to take a £500,000 cash pot home instead.
An achievement such as John’s looked unlikely when Jeremy first took over as presenter two years ago, as the level of general knowledge was so bad that contestants rarely made it to five figures, let alone seven.
Sun columnist and Grand Tour host Jeremy, 60, said: “I’m not quite sure what the selection process is for candidates but I think it’s definitely changed, because we’re getting much better people in the room now than we did in perhaps the first series.
“I mean, that woman who phoned a friend about SAS and thought it stood for super ability or whatever . . .
“Just morons, absolute morons, getting into the chair and winning enough for a fridge-freezer — and wasting ten minutes of television in the process, so it’s really infuriating.
“But in the next run, they’re all very good. And one or two are exceptionally good contestants, not just that they know lots of stuff, they’re also very nice people.
“And everybody wants to see a nice person have some good fortune.”
The show’s return could not be better timed, as not only are we all indoors and craving new telly to watch, but it comes fresh off the back of ITV drama Quiz — the story of how Major Charles Ingram cheated his way to the show’s top prize with an accomplice in the audience coughing to signal the right answers.
The series, seen by more than ten million viewers, left some wondering if the former Army man and his wife Diana had been the victims of a cruel miscarriage of justice.
But Jeremy was not one of them.
He said: “I thought it was absolutely fascinating and I was just talking to someone who is absolutely convinced they’re innocent.
“That was the clever thing about Quiz, I thought. They are guilty as sin, I’m really convinced, but others are absolutely convinced of their innocence.
“I thought the performances were spectacular, they were all fantastic, just so brilliantly cast. Great drama.”
When the Ingrams swindled their way to the top prize in 2001, and were later given suspended prison sentences for their efforts, then-host Chris Tarrant said he had not heard any wrongdoing, despite sitting just centimetres from Ingram in the studio.
Chris even stood up in court and said he had not heard any coughing throughout the episode while Ingram was in the hot seat.
But Jeremy thinks the reason Chris did not clock the misbehaviour by Ingram or accomplice Tecwen Whittock was because he was so focused on the job in hand — making memorable telly.
He said: “Tarrant just thought he was lucky or clever or a bit of a buffoon but certainly at the time he didn’t think he cheated.
“And obviously when you’re hosting the show, half of you is paying attention to the person sitting in front of you, but the other half is thinking about you making a TV show.
“I guess if you’re only paying half of your attention to the contestant you perhaps wouldn’t notice something untoward is happening.
“I don’t think I’d be any different. You just think, ‘Wow this is good television,’ and then just switch into TV presenter mode.”
When Jeremy and I chat over the phone instead of in person, due to lockdown, he has a raging hangover after he and girlfriend Lisa Hogan downed bottles of rosé wine while waiting up to spot badgers on his farm in Chipping Norton, Oxon.
He said: “It turns out it’s fantastically boring — you sit huddled in a wood and the only thing you can do is drink, which is what we did.”
He added with a laugh: “We are embarrassed by the amount of bottles at the end of the drive. We are having to ration the amount we put down there.
“People are driving by, going, ‘They aren’t locked down, they’ve got hundreds of people dropping by, they’re having parties!’ No, no, it’s just us.”
Tractor life has become the norm for Jeremy, and while he is filming his day-to-day activities for a new Amazon show, it really is a proper working farm, with proper working hours.
He said: “I’ve got to go and cultivate 25 acres today. It’s honestly bloody hard work. I know all farmers will say the same thing but you don’t get any money for it and the weather is always wrong.
“If you’re going to pick the first year to start farming . . . the wettest planting season on record, then Brexit, which is going to really screw it up, and now Covid-19. I couldn’t have picked better.
“Television-wise it’s going to be an amazing series. We’ve got those three things all happening while I’m filming.
“The rain was the trickiest. We had seven solid weeks of it. That really screwed me up. It also turns out I’m not very good at building dams.
“I’ve got 140 lambs stood in a field, all going, ‘Where’s my f***ing water?’ while I’m trying to build a dam.
“I know it will have broken again in the night. I’m just trying to make a small pond so they can drink.
“I looked at how they built the Hoover Dam — but it turns out that’s got nothing to do with a farm in the Cotswolds.”
Garden designer Judith was the first winner of the million-pound prize, triumphing in the eighth series of the show.
To date she remains the only woman to have scooped the jackpot.
The former physics teacher won the second jackpot in the ninth series.
He later appeared on a special edition with Tara Palmer-Tomkinson but they only won £32,000 for charity.
The retired banker went on the show just 11 days after the scandal of cheating Major Charles Ingram and was also in the audience during Ingram’s turn in the hot seat.
He went on to win the prize fair and square.
The former Army major was stripped of the top prize after being convicted of deception in court.
A jury said his wife Diana and lecturer Tecwen Whittock had helped him win by coughing at right answers.
Irish software developer and quiz enthusiast Pat astounded host Chris Tarrant by clinching the top prize with two of his lifelines remaining.
The now-professional quizzer went on to get a job on BBC show Eggheads.
The father of five – who was a Mastermind finalist in 1980 – is the last British contestant to win the £1million prize money.
He used all of his lifelines before storming to victory in series 20.
