Sheen admits he has some big shoes to fill
Quiz STV, 9pm
ACTOR Michael Sheen is no stranger to playing real-life figures. Over the course of his career, he’s played Kenneth Williams, Sir David Frost, Brian Clough and, perhaps most famously, Tony Blair. However, when it was first announced that he was going to play Chris Tarrant in Quiz, some people may have wondered if that was a stretch too far, due to the lack of resemblance between them. But then we got a look at the trailers… For viewers who need their memory jogged, or are perhaps too young to remember the days of the “Coughing Major” scandal, Quiz, which is showing across three consecutive evenings, looks at the events of 2001, when Charles
Ingram (Matthew Macfadyen) won the top prize on the hugely popular quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, which Tarrant presented. However, the show’s producers became suspicious, leading to a trial that gripped the nation’s media. Sheen admits that playing someone so well-known was daunting. He says: “He is someone who is incredibly familiar to us as an audience with a very particular kind of voice. The characteristics that make him such a popular TV personality are also the characteristics that can make someone easy to caricature. “You look for things to hang on to in playing someone like that. You go, ‘Right, I’ll use that’ because audiences will recognise that and, hopefully, it will help them believe
I’m this person. But at the same time, if you make too much of those things then it does just become a caricature.” But in researching the role, he gained a new admiration for Tarrant’s presenting skills. Sheen says: “I watched as much of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as I possibly could. Especially the early shows. “Because Chris Tarrant is so brilliant at what he does on that show, I had to watch it over and over again to see what it is that he is actually doing a lot of the time… He makes it look effortless. Creating the tension and yet at the same time being very accessible, entertaining and funny.” In fact, he so enjoyed being Tarrant, it seems he’d like to play him again – preferably on a quiz
show. Sheen says: “I love TV quiz shows. I’m slightly obsessed with them. I did The Chase last year. I did Pointless Celebrities. I had this plan that I wanted to try and do every single quiz and game show on British TV. I would definitely do Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? “Having played Chris Tarrant, though, I would also like to host an actual show as Chris Tarrant. Because I loved doing that. I’m the sort of person that when you play board games with the family, I really like to be the question asker and the person who’s in charge. I love that.” Before someone makes that a reality though, we have Quiz to enjoy. It begins as television producer Paul Smith (Mark Bonnar) puts everything on the line to make his new quiz show a hit.