The BT salesman who dreamed up TV’s toughest quiz William G Stewart
(but sold the rights for just £200)
THE return to TV after an absence of ten years of Fifteen To One — the most intelligent and challenging quiz show of its time, with a daily audience of four million viewers — takes my mind back to its beginnings.
In 1986, I had received the letter that was to change my life, although I was so busy at the time — producing The Price is Right and making a new sitcom starring Warren Mitchell from Till Death Us Do Part — that I very nearly didn’t get round to opening it.
It came from a chap called John M. Lewis, a former sales manager with BT who said he had an idea for a new television quiz show. He called it Twenty To One.
It was a good idea, and knowing that it had already been rejected by nine other producers and sensing that John would probably be very keen to make any sort of positive progress, I made him an offer.
I’d pay him £200 if he gave me a 12-month option to develop the idea. Well, that £200 was the best money I’ve ever spent in my life.
For it led, of course, to Fifteen To One, the hugely popular Channel 4 quiz show that I presented and produced for 15 years.
In all, we made 2,265 programmes, with almost 34,000 contestants endeavouring to answer an astonishing 350,000 questions.
Once, the show topped Channel 4’s viewing figures every day for a week.
Originally running between January 4, 1988 and December 19, 2003, each show began with 15 contestants and whittled them down to three finalists.
To avoid elimination they had to not only answer questions correctly, but also decide which of their opponents to nominate to put under the question spotlight.
The 15 highest-scoring winners from the series were then entered into a grand final to find the overall champion.
Arguably, the combination of t actical skills and general knowledge made t he show unique and influenced successors such as The Weakest Link.
I’m pleased — and rather flattered — that a decade or so after our last grand final, the show is back. Naturally, it’s a little odd seeing someone else presenting it, but I think Sandi Toksvig is a very good choice. She’s funny, a good broadcaster but, most importantly of all, she’s intelligent.
I’ve always thought that what made Fifteen To One the institution it became was its intelligence.
It was sheer happenstance that I got into quiz shows at all.
By the mid-Seventies I’d carved out a pretty successful career as a producer/director of sitcoms and the occasional drama, too, having worked with Patrick Cargill on Father, Dear Father and Sid James in Bless This House, made a series with Harry Worth, and produced several episodes of Love Thy Neighbour with Rudolph Walker, Jack Smethurst and Nina Baden-Semper. And then I got a call from ATV asking me to go the States and look at a show called Family Feud with a view to buying the format. I ended up producing the first three series of what in the UK we called Family Fortunes, presented original l y by Bob Monkhouse. Suddenly, I was a quiz show producer and, when The Price Is Right with Leslie Crowther soon followed, a pretty successful one at that. Which, I suppose, is why, several years later, John had got in touch with me.
I began trialling his idea but, hard as I tried, I could never whittle down 20 contestants to one winner inside half an hour, which was vital if we wanted to get it commissioned.
I realised it would work better if we reduced the starting line-up to 15. There wouldn’t be a lot of time for chat or banter but it could be done.
I took the proposal to Channel 4, and they liked it enough to commission a proper studio pilot.
Great, I said, I’ll present the pilot, as I understand how the show should work, and then if you like it we can discuss who we should get to present it full time.
But when Channel 4 gave the green light for the first series to be made, they said they wanted me to present it. In fact, they wanted to bring in someone else to produce the show, so that I could concentrate on presenting.
But I wasn’t having that: by now Fifteen To One felt like my baby. After a bit of thought, they gave me the go-ahead to do both jobs.
Fif t een To One s oon became an established part of the tea-time television landscape. But its success wasn’t down to me alone; the real credit belonged to my wonderful production team and the superb team of question setters that I’d assembled.
That’s what people liked about the show: the questions were properly tough and if you were playing along at home, you needed to have your wits about you.
I didn’t set the questions but I did select them and I loved it ONE when one of the setters delivered a particularly good one.
of my favourites was: ‘ Who is the only person to have won a Nobel prize and an Oscar?’ Got it yet? The answer is George Bernard Shaw who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and then won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for Pygmalion in 1938.
I remember asking for ‘more like that’ after someone delivered that gem. That brilliant team, some of whom now set questions for Mastermind, did just that for show after show, year after year.
Indeed, they set such a high standard that the only quiz shows I watch regularly now are Mastermind and University Challenge.
Even now, a decade after our final show was broadcast and 14 years after I sold the format to Fremantle Media, I still take that wonderful team of people out for lunch at Christmas.
John quite rightly became an important member of the team — he received a royalty for every show, became a quiz consultant and wrote tie-in books.
People don’t believe me when I tell them I don’t watch today’s quiz shows, but it’s true; I don’t.
I never saw The Weakest Link, while Who Wants To Be A Millionaire just wasn’t my kind of show. These days, people keep asking me what I think of Pointless, but I haven’t seen it.
I’ll leave it to others to say what influence Fifteen To One had on those quizzes that followed it.
We were intelligent, challenging and popular and if people think we raised the bar a little, that’s good enough for me.
FiFTeen To One is on Channel 4 weekdays at 4.30pm