Five Minutes to a Fortune

Did You Know?

• The French channel TF1 was the first international broadcaster to launch a local format, with a pilot called Pas une seconde à perdre ! hosted by Estelle Denis and Gérard Vives.
• In the French version, the hourglass would have contained €25,000.
• The French pilot was scheduled to premiere at the end of January 2014.

Format

A towering fifteen-foot hourglass, filled with tokens representing a starting prize of fifty thousand pounds, dominated the studio. Two contestants began by selecting their roles. One became the Game Player, responsible for completing five rounds of challenges. The other was the Time Keeper, who decided how many seconds the Game Player had for each round and also picked the category from a list of seven broad themes, such as Animal Lover, Couch Potato, Film/History Buff, Trivia Junkie, and Wordsmith. Once a category was used, it was removed from the list. The Time Keeper had a total of five minutes to distribute across all five rounds and was encouraged to allocate more time to categories that might be difficult for the Game Player.

Each round required the Game Player to deliver five correct answers. After the Time Keeper chose a category, an example of the specific game—twenty-seven different games existed in the first series—was shown to both contestants. Then the Time Keeper set the time limit. The Game Player often had to respond in unusual ways, like spelling an answer backwards or using the numbers on a touch-tone telephone keypad. They could pass on a question as often as they liked, but because the bank of questions was limited, passing too many times would cause the same questions to reappear. The Game Player could guess on any question repeatedly, but could only move to a new question by giving the correct answer or passing. Answers to any passed questions were revealed after the round ended.

When the Game Player reached the final ten seconds of the time the Time Keeper had set, the hourglass began to flip. Once time expired, tokens started to drain into the lower section, and the prize pot shrank at a steady rate of six hundred twenty-five pounds every three seconds, which amounted to twelve thousand five hundred pounds per minute. This meant the entire original pot would empty in four minutes. The round continued until either the Game Player gave a fifth correct answer or the hourglass was completely empty. If the answer was given, the draining stopped immediately. If the hourglass emptied, the Game Player crashed out, the game ended, and the contestants left with nothing. If the Game Player finished the round within the allotted time, the prize pot stayed intact, but any leftover time was lost permanently.