Television
My old man's a millionaire
Ian Hislop
It couldn't have been me. I didn't buy a ticket. But I did watch The National Lottery Live (BBC 1, Saturday 7 p.m.) in order to find out who had won. This was stupid of me since you do not find out who has won on the programme itself. You have to wall a few days for this until envious friends and neighbours have shopped the winners to the tabloids.
After all the frenzied build-up this made the televised draw a bit of a let down, since all you really wanted to see was someone becoming a millionaire in front of your eyes. As it turned out the only millionaire on view was Noel Edmunds and the sight of him getting even richer was not much Of a consolation. As Noel tried to whip his pastel track-suited studio audience into a . frenzy of greed he even brought on nul; lions of pounds in cash for them to drop' over. 'Imagine this!' Noel exclaimed patr°' nisingly stroking a bundle of notes. 'slut; don't have to imagine it, Noely!' I wanted someone to shout at him. 'That's what you earn in a year! You win the lottery all the time!' No one did shout this of course and Noel continued to act as if he was Just, some ordinary punter to whom a couple or million pounds would make a difference. Watching a clever man dressed 111 a smart suit orchestrating an event where, ordinary people in tracksuits make fools of themselves suddenly seemed an uncomfort- able metaphor for the whole lottery. The men at Camelot have certainly won the jackpot this week.
The winning numbers were actually announced at the end of the hour-long pro- gramme, so Noel had to fill up the rest of the show with something else. Television is often accused of being a waste of time but it is rare to watch something so obviously designed to be a waste of time. Noel man- aged to kill 50 minutes by getting the stu- dio audience to compete for the privilege of pressing the button which starts the machine which chooses the lottery num- bers. This may not seem much of a prize but a number of supposedly ordinary peo- ple got very excited about it and eagerly Played silly games with celebrities for the honour of 'making television history'. One of these games was particularly embarrassing as it involved Sir Georg Solti Conducting a band of deliberately incompe- tent musicians. They played three pieces badly and the contestants had to guess what the pieces were. Most of them spotted Yellow Submarine'. A few of them got 'My Old Man's A Dustman'. No one had any idea about the third piece. Poor Sir Georg looked amazed and protested that this was the most popular piece of classical music around. But it was not popular enough for Noel's panel. Not one of them had recog- nised the 'Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's Ninth. This is not exactly the Schnittke piece that I tried to sit through the next day (Sunday, BBC2) and found too long even at ten minutes but there were not even any guesses for Beethoven. Noel turned to laugh at the studio audience. 'We knew that, didn't we?' he asked. 'Yes' they all hooted back. No wonder the Arts need sponsoring. But will the lottery help or will the govern- ment use it as an excuse for cutting subsi- dies? Will charities benefit from the lottery or will total charitable donations decrease as the lottery mops up the public's con- science? Is the lottery merely an exercise in taking money from the poor and giving it to the middle-classes in subsidies for their enthusiasms? Surprisingly enough these questions were not asked in Noel's big play-off. Instead the last two contestants were asked 'how many senses do humans have?"Five'. Yes, indeed, but as the organisers of the lottery have accurately calculated, commonsense is not one of them.
The luck of the Irish!'
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