He covered pop stars in gunge to make children laugh, then gave away millions in the nation’s most popular quiz. Now Chris Tarrant tells the RTS what it was like...
Chris Tarrant has been a TV face for five decades, graduating from the anarchy of fabled children’s show Tiswas to become the host of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Away from the cameras, his easy charm made his Capital breakfast show one of the most popular radio programmes of its era.
At the end of last year, he announced his retirement from television. But before fleeing the limelight, Tarrant looked back over his career, anecdotes at the ready, in the company of Sangeeta Bhabra, presenter of ITV regional news programme Meridian, for an RTS event in Southampton.
The way the self-deprecating Tarrant tells it, his TV career was accidental. After leaving Birmingham University with an English degree, he tried teaching for a year and did a succession of odd jobs. One of those took him to the showground in Kenilworth, where he saw a TV reporter plying his trade.
“I remember thinking, ‘That’s not a bad gig.’ It didn’t look difficult. And I’ll be honest... it’s not difficult,” he said.
The young Tarrant wrote to lots of TV companies. “It was a dreadful better... very brash. It included this phrase: ‘I am the face of the 70s – this is your last chance to snap me up’.”
Two ITV regional companies, Yorkshire Television and ATV in Birmingham, saw potential and offered him a start. Tarrant remained unenthused: “I was living in Dorset and fishing just about every day of the week – I loved it. I didn’t really want to [leave].”
Apparently, Tarrant put off the opportunity for months, making excuse after excuse. When he finally did take up ATV’s offer, he soon found himself in a full-time job, working for the news team. Clearly, he was better than he remembers, although he was having none of it. “I wasn’t very good,” he maintained. “I was interviewing shop stewards, mayors, politicians, local councillors, and I disliked them all. Their lips were moving and I just knew they were lying.
“I think [ATV] would have got rid of me because I really was a waste of space. I didn’t enjoy it at all. Luckily for me, they gave me, as a try-out, lighter items, and I was in heaven. Every night, some lunatic would come in, and I interviewed them.”
This included a man who did charity walks with ferrets down his trousers. A couple of years later, Tarrant was chosen to co-host a new children’s programme, Tiswas. “It became a legendary show and it changed my life,” he told the RTS audience, many of whom were local students.
The cool kids watched the manic, anarchic Tiswas – which started out as an ATV Midlands show and was then taken up by ITV regions around the country – rather than the staid, Noel Edmonds-fronted Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on BBC.
Tiswas featured slapstick from the Phantom Flan Flinger, sketches (Lenny Henry as Trevor McDoughnut, spoofing the newsreader) and Bob Carolgees’ unhinged puppet, Spit the Dog, who did little other than spit. Parents were put in cages and drenched; pop stars were covered in gunge. Tarrant, who hosted the show from 1974 to 1981 and also produced some series, recalled: “It was such a laugh, so much fun, unscripted, chaotic. It became a real cult thing – we were like rock stars everywhere we went.”
The show made his name, although OTT, a late-night adult version of Tiswas for ITV, proved less successful and only lasted one series.
Tarrant moved to Capital Radio in 1984 and stayed for two decades, the last 17 years of those as host of the breakfast show. “It was the best fun; it was such a laugh. I met so many of my heroes,” said Tarrant.
At Capital, Tarrant’s breakfast show was initially produced by David Briggs, who also devised most of its games and quizzes. After leaving Capital, Briggs concentrated on creating quizzes and – with Mike Whitehill and Steven Knight (who would go on to create Peaky Blinders and SAS Rogue Heroes) – devised Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Busy with his radio show and Tarrant on TV, a long-running ITV series featuring clips from bizarre TV shows, Tarrant recalled “not wanting to do this programme at all”. But he agreed to host a pilot, and that changed his mind. Tarrant himself came up with its most enduring catchphrase – “But we don’t want to give you that” – and the trademark long pauses designed to rack up the tension.
Millionaire was a TV phenomenon for ITV from its first episodes in September 1998, attracting audiences of more than 19 million in its early days and becoming a big seller internationally. Tarrant hosted the quiz for almost 600 episodes before leaving in 2014.
Fittingly, for a man who professes to prefer the rod and line to TV, one of his final TV shows was Channel 5’s Chris Tarrant Goes Fishing.
Is that your final (cough, cough) answer?
Major Charles Ingram, who did and then didn’t win the £1m jackpot in 2001, is Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’s most infamous contestant. Ingram’s prize money was withheld over suspicions that his answers were assisted by helpful coughs from the audience, largely by a college lecturer, Tecwen Whittock, but also by his wife Diana Ingram.
Almost two decades later, his story was told in James Graham’s play and subsequent ITV drama, Quiz, with Michael Sheen (pictured right) as a note-perfect Chris Tarrant. At the RTS event, Tarrant recalled that Ingram ‘came into rehearsal and was just hopeless – he was all over the place. He was convinced that Rupert Murdoch was South African. He seemed a nice enough bloke but we didn’t think he was going to go very far.
‘He was on over two nights, Sunday and Monday. [On Sunday,] he had one lifeline left. That is not how million-pound winners [perform]. Most of them get to about £250,000 before they pause for breath, but he was really struggling.
‘The next night, he came in and he seemed very confident, considering how badly he’d done. He went up to £8,000, £16,000, £32,000. Forget about what happened afterwards – it was the most exciting television programme I’ve ever hosted. It got to £500,000. I’ve said to probably a dozen or so people over the years: “Now look, you’ve got 500 grand. If you go to the next question and get it right, and I hope you do, you win a million quid. But if you get it wrong, you lose £468,000”. The only one who didn’t flinch and said “Let’s play” was the major, because he knew he was going to answer the next question, and he knew he was going to win a million quid.
‘[Later that night, the producers] sat through the whole show: basically, with every question up to £1m, there was this cough, which is quite extraordinary. Then they rang the police…’
Soon enough, Ingram had swapped the Millionaire chair for a seat in the dock. ‘The judge was obviously a fan of the show. [After I answered a question,] he leaned over to me and said: “Mr Tarrant, is that your final answer?’”
Both Charles and Diana Ingram along with Whittock were found guilty of cheating (in legal language: ‘procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception’) and received a suspended sentence and fine.
An evening in conversation with Chris Tarrant’ was held at Southampton Solent University on 19 March and produced by RTS Southern
