Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?: Yorkshireman who formerly worked on show with Chris Tarrant writes book on TV quiz programmes

An amicable lunch meeting with the executive producer followed and Tony Nicholson had bagged himself a job on what is arguably the most successful television quiz show of all time.

He spent ten years working on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, writing scripts for quizmaster Tarrant and briefing his friend on the programme’s contestants.

What sticks with him the most is not the big wins that Nicholson witnessed, but the more modest sums of money that recipients took away.

Many were life-changing triumphs, thousands of pounds that saw the paying off of student loans, for example, or first steps being taken onto the property ladder; sums that paid for the care fees of elderly relatives or for home alterations that transformed the lives of children with disabilities.

"One was very aware that it was the most successful quiz show in the world of all time and it was a privilege to work on that,” reflects 71-year-old Nicholson. “There were some lovely moments – these kind of things were really heart-warming.”

He recounts one particular story of a retired woman whose adult son had emigrated to Australia some years before. She and her husband could not afford to fly out there to see him and consequently, they had a daughter-in-law and grandchildren they had never even met.

"We were all rooting for this woman to win some money. There was this magical moment when we realised she’d won enough and was guaranteed to be able to fly to Australia and see the family she had never met. We were all in the studio punching the air and shouting ‘yes’.”

The tale is one that Nicholson writes of in his new book Great British TV Quiz Shows. It chronicles the history and evolution of the genre, delving into the likes of Mastermind and University Challenge, alongside Bullseye, The Weakest Link and Pointless, to name just a few of the programmes.

“I didn’t want it to be a dry, dusty encyclopedia on the subject, so I’ve done it in a more personal way with my own observations as a television insider myself on how the whole genre has evolved."

Those personal touches are evident, particularly in Ilkley-born Nicholson’s words around Millionaire and his emotional investment in many of its contestants. He also shares his thoughts on the show’s ‘coughing scandal’, which saw Major Charles Ingram accused of cheating his way to the £1 million top prize back in 2001.

"I have heard the arguments that people cough in TV studios all the time,” Nicholson writes. “Now, I have spent half my life in TV studios, and, yes of course, people in audiences do cough.

"However, I have also sat down with Chris Tarrant and forensically viewed the unedited tapes of that show at his home, and I have never heard such obviously deliberate, unnatural-sounding and well-timed coughing as that.”

Despite being “obsessed” with showbusiness, Nicholson actually embarked on a career in the chemical industry. His first job was for a dyestuff manufacturer, though at night he’d more than likely be found writing – or on stage in – amateur productions.

He held down the dyestuff job, but started to send off scripts to the BBC and offered up gags to the comics of the time. The very first joke that he sold – for comedy sketch show The Two Ronnies - earned him a tenner. “It was still very much a hobby and I didn’t think it ever would become a living,” Nicholson reflects. “The turning point was meeting Chris Tarrant.”

The pair were first in contact forty years ago, when Tarrant was hosting Saturday late-night programme O.T.T. Nicholson started writing scripts for the show and a friendship soon blossomed.

“Virtually everything he’s done, I’ve been involved with in some way or another,” Nicholson says. “I would write for him and he always would say I could speak fluent Tarrant.”

It marked the start of what would become a full-time career for Nicholson as a TV researcher, scriptwriter and, later, producer. Now an author, he has written the biographies of comedians Sir Ken Dodd and Larry Grayson, but this is his personal guide to television quiz shows, a genre he has loved since being a boy.

He hopes that his readers will wallow in nostalgia, learning too some rather surprising facts about many of the quizzes they have watched over the years. Good friend Tarrant has written the foreword. "Everybody loves a quiz,” Tarrant muses. “Quizzes feed the very human trait of wanting to be right all the time.

“Through our lives we all accumulate huge quantities of facts, trivia and knowledge, most of it completely and utterly useless in everyday life, and much of it never ever used again, but a quiz allows us to make use of all that otherwise yawn-inducing information.

"Sometimes for praise from others, but often, if alone in your car, or in front of the telly, just for your own smug satisfaction.”

That ‘play-at-home’ factor is key to a good quiz, Nicholson agrees. Simplicity, a good host and a dollop of jeopardy keeps viewers hooked.

"You can see through the book how TV quizzes have evolved, how the prizes and shows have altered,” he says. “But at the end of the day it all boils down to somebody asking a question and the contestant either getting it right or wrong – and nothing in that respect has changed.”

Great British TV Quiz Shows by Tony Nicholson, is published by Great Northern Books, out now.