"But we only want the numbers!"

Since 19th November 1994, every Saturday night (bar a couple of special weeks, as marks of respect for Princess Diana and the Queen Mother), many people watch BBC1 in anticipation that their lottery numbers get drawn at odds of almost 14,000,000 to 1 and they get made a millionaire. The draws take place normally at eight o' clock. But the draws only take a couple of minutes, and received wisdom indicates that a show has to be over 15 minutes long for it to count towards the ratings. To this end, the BBC created several entertainment formats for the weekly lottery show. Some of these have been good and justify their build up to the lottery draws (Winning Lines) and others have been hosted by Ian Wright.

Since 5th February 1997 there has been a midweek draw on Wednesday nights just before nine o clock. The BBC seem less bothered by this and the shows have been a maximum of ten minutes long. This hasn't stopped them developing a couple of formats for the slot though.

Although we're primarily a gameshow page, let's first take a look at the non-gameshow formats they've used for the lottery show.

The first, and probably best remembered one was the original National Lottery Live, hosted originally by Scottish comic Gordon Kennedy and Anthea Turner. This lasted several years and with many different hosts (Bob Monkhouse and Terry Wogan all had several week runs, Bob's was the only time where the draw machine wouldn't start and so they had to come back after Saturday night hospital drama staple Casualty), it mainly consisted of winner's stories and news of lottery charity handouts that a proportion of the £1 entry fee have gone towards. It also made a star out of Mystic Meg, the show's resident fortune teller, who was writing for the News of the World at the time and now does the horoscopes for The Sun newspaper as well. She was lampooned by Brian Conley on The Brian Conley Show with him dressed up as "Septic Peg" and predicting really obvious things. Brian Conley went on to host We've Got Your Number, which we'll get on to later. The National Lottery Live went on tour with Bradley Walsh in 1998, although it had previously been on tour with Kennedy and Turner before finding a permanent home at Television Centre.

The current news/variety format sufficed but seemed a bit half-arsed. That's when Dale Winton came along with The National Lottery Stars which had four series between 1998 and 2001, as well as a special Dale Winton's Stars hour format in April 2000. This was a more tradtional half-hour music/variety show with the draws slotted in at the end.

The Wednesday night formats have, with the occasional exception, been fairly dull human interest/see-where-the-grants have gone shows, normally hosted by Carol Smilie (Amazing Luck Stories (98/99), The National Lottery UK 2000 (2000)), Shauna Lowry (Amazing Luck Stories series two (2000)) or both (National Lottery Local Hero (1999)). The National Lottery Greatest Hits (1999) saw actress Angela Griffin give bands from the seventies and eighties a chance to sing a song. The National Lottery Love Songs in 1999, where an artist would sing a love song, was hosted by Claudia Winkleman and was bafflingly on between July and September rather than, I don't know, February. Since they added the National Lottery Extra draw in 2000, they've stopped bothering with a format on Wednesday night and just had the draws (originally hosted by Brenda Emmanus and now tends to be hosted by whoever is hosting whatever Saturday show is going on at the time).

Right, we can get on with the gameshows bit now. The very first episode, hosted by Noel Edmonds and replacing Noel's House Party for that one week took place on the 19th Novembr 1994 and took the form of a gameshow. 49 members of the audience were whittled down to one person in a series of It's a Knockout-esque games to determine who would be the first to press the magic button and start the first live draw.

The next one to come up was The National Lottery Big Ticket in 1998 hosted by Patrick Kielty and Anthea Turner which was universally panned by critics. Annoyingly, this could have been quite good, as it was clearly based on big Saturday night mental and physical Endemol gameshow formats rolled out across Europe such as Germany's Die 100,000 Mark Show. This was tied in the new Lottery Scratchcards that jad just been introduced (these ones were special because they cost £2 to buy rather than the normal £1). Eight people who scratched off to reveal three stars would be able to come to the studio and win up to £100,000. They didn't have to do anything though, instead celebrity/charity champions played the games for them (in fairness, some of these (the ones nicked from the European shows mainly) were quite good. We liked the lift race, for example, and we liked the high tension games normally involving bungee jumps). When the winning pair was found, a spinning safe decided which of the two scratchcard winners would blow up some doors for between £50,000 and £100,000 in prize money. This was actually the most in cash that had ever been given away on television at that time. Many reports suggested that the shows were so boring to film that most of the audience walked out during the recordings (during National Lottery gameshows, most of the show is prerecorded with the live draws slotted in). It lasted all of one series.

In 1999, Brian Conley got his own National Lottery show, We've Got Your Number (which was originally going to be called Your Number's Up and was going to be hosted by Phillippa Forrester) where people with grudges against each other, or people who felt they deserved a second chance at something which went comically wrong for them in their lives, came on the show and "let the balls decide". Nothing really memorable here.

1999 also saw the only Wednesday night self-contained format in The National Lottery Third Degree. Three representatives from three charities fought it out in a buzzer quiz hosted by Eamonn Holmes with questions worth one, two or three points in the first, second or third minute. This was done in some sort of knockout tournament over months, and we have no idea what the overall winner won.

The first major Lottery format came along in 1999. The National Lottery Winning Lines produced by Millionaire makers Celador is still going and is due to start a fifth series at time of writing. Originally presented by Simon Mayo who left after two series to be replaced by Philip Schofield, Winning Lines was based largely on Celador's old ITV show Talking Telephone Numbers. 49 contestants were given a number between 01 and 49. Six people got through the first round, and if you take the second digits of the six winning contestants and you can rearrange them to make the last six digits of your phone number, you could ring up for a place in next week's show. The six winners battle is out through a sudden death contest to get down to one who got to take part in the Wonderwall, a test of knowledge, observation and memory which one of the best television end games ever. Even without the lottery aspect, the show sold abroad, and whilse in Britain all you could win was a three week round the world holiday, in the US the top prize was a million dollars.

Red Alert (1999/2000), hosted by Terry Alderton and Lulu was a massively high profile flop for Chris Evans who produced it. Essentially trying to catch the live 'n' loud excitement of the legendary Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, thirty-strong representatives from four streets from around the UK battled it out to become Britain's top street and then winning a stupidly titled game called Happy Chimneys to win a holiday for everyone who won. Lulu admitted herself she wasn't a people person, and it was doen to Essex lad Alderton to whip up the audience. Amazingly it came back for a second series with a modified format, two streets would battle it out over three rounds (two quizzes and an arm wrestling round) and the winners would take part in another quiz to determine if they won a holiday or not. Throw in a musical performance and you've got another failure. One of the things we remember best about Red Alert was that the broadly accented darts commentator Syd Waddell provided the voiceover for the first episode and was quietly dropped soon after.

The incredibly anodyne National Lottery On The Spot with Des O Connor and Suzi Perry ran on Saturday nights through July and August of 2000. It toured the country with Perry out on the streets asking people questions for cash and O Connor quizzing two people in the studio on specialist subjects to win a dream.

The next big lottery format hit was The National Lottery Jet Set which began in January 2001 with captain Eamonn Holmes at the helm. Six people competed to spend a week living the life of the "jet set", a week of unadulterated luxury in an exotic destination. Quite a nice prize, and one the winners got the chance to defend week after week. Other than We've Got Your Number, this is the only show with a proper live element to it as the balls determined who got to choose categories in the head to head end game. This was devised by 12 Yard, David Young's production company who had previously produced popular quiz The Weakest Link.

The third of the Big Three lottery gameshows began in 2002. In In It to Win It, five people were goaded by Dale Winton into winning lots of money. Five contestants aimed to be in the right place at the right time (Winner's Row from Contestant's Row) at the end of the show. To begin, a random person is chosen. They have to answer multiple choice questions worth £5,000 each. If they get a question wrong, they have to go to a red danger area, and somebody else is randomly chosen to join Winner's Row. The person in the red area gets the next question right, they're back on Winner's Row, if not, they're right back where they started. After twenty questions, whoever is on Winner's Row face one final question for a share of the prize pot. If they get it right they win, if they get it wrong they win nothing. This is also devised by David Young.

More recently we've had ex-Arsenal footballer Ian Wright hosting shows, The Wright Ticket (2003) which was a mixture of celebrity interviews and music and Wright Around the World, a very boring show where contestants could win a luxury round the world holiday but was apparently so bad many of the production team walked out during the recording of the first episode. How many more puns they can get from the name 'Wright' remains to be seen.

Apart from a couple of weeks, there has been one thing that has remained constant over the ten years. Alan Deddicoat has been "the voice of the balls" since day one, no matter what the show.

Do lottery shows have a future? Well, people still moan about the fact that they just want the numbers (despite the fact that it's been 8PM since the beginning of time, and that the numbers come up on other channels if you're watching something else) but the big three quizzes still pull in just enough viewers to be worth continuing with (although we suspect Winning Lines is the only one that would probably survive without the lottery backing). SKY One have the Euromillions draw which really is only five minutes, but is far less high profile for a draw which offers much higher prizemoney.

What's more interesting is that fewer people are playing the lottery on Saturday nights. This could be down to the same amount of money being spread over multitude of draws. But what if the quality of lottery show is having a knock-on effect on the amount of people bothering to buy tickets? Think about it.

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