Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
international game show franchise originated in England
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (WWTBAM) is an international television game show franchise of British origin, created by David Briggs, Mike Whitehill and Steven Knight. In its format, currently owned and licensed by Sony Pictures Television, contestants tackle a series of multiple-choice questions to win large cash prizes in a format that twists on many game show genre conventions – only one contestant plays at a time. Similar to radio quizzes, contestants are given the question before deciding whether to answer and have no time limit to answer questions. The cash prize increases as they tackle questions that become increasingly difficult, with the maximum offered in most variants of the format being an aspirational value in the respective local currency, such as £1 million in the British version, €1 million in most European versions, $1 million in the American version and ₹70 million (₹7 crore) in the Indian version.
The original British version debuted on 4 September 1998 on the ITV network, hosted by Chris Tarrant, and ran until 11 February 2014. A revived series of seven episodes to commemorate its 20th anniversary aired in May 2018, hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, and ITV renewed the show for several more series.
Since its debut, international variants of the show have been aired in around 100 countries, making it the best-selling TV format in television history, and is credited by some as paving the way for the boom in the popularity of reality television.
History
The format of the show was created by David Briggs, Mike Whitehill and Steven Knight, who had earlier created a number of the promotional games for Tarrant's morning show on Capital FM radio, such as the bong game. Tentatively known as Cash Mountain, the show took its finalised title from a song written by Cole Porter for the 1956 film High Society, starring Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm.
“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” enters the record as international game show franchise originated in England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wants, Millionaire and international can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q200562. VIAF identifies the subject as 513160978141617940005. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2014, 2018 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.