"That Was Then, This Is Now" is being produced by Celador, the company that make "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire". We were in their offices today, trying to get all the dispirate elements of the show into a cohesive whole, which was quite a tricky job: there are a few writers and as we're starting from scratch the house style has not been firmly established. It is also very difficult to know if a new show is going to work. It brought back memories of the old radio shows we used to do ten years ago and how you would read the script the day before and be unable to tell anymore whether there was anything funny in it. I had the same empty feeling in my stomach and was beginning to get nervous. Was my opening chat amusing or just a couple of pages of gobbledegook revolving largely around jokes about cutting off the legs of a girl I was at school with?
It being a Saturday the offices of Celador were largely empty and we had a free run of the place. At around about six the four writers who were doing the final script were sent down to an office to work on computers. There were lots of boxes and files marked "WWTBAM" and we had free access to all the computer files.
Naturally we wondered if the questions to the show were somewhere in the vicinity. We realised that if we could also find the files which detailed which contestants were on the show, we could add our names to the top and get to go on the show, armed with all the answers. If we all answered our questions quickly there was every chance that there would be enough time for all four of us to win a million pounds. Of course someone at Celador might smell a rat if four people all involved with one of their shows ended up managing to get on the programme and all won the jackpot in the space of an hour, but that was a risk that we were prepared to take. Who Dares Wins.
We probably wasted about three or four hours looking for these files, but to no avail. They don't even have the WWTBAM computer game on their computers (but maybe they are sick of the show having to work on it all the time). Perhaps their security is better than we imagined.
