It's the Riverdance of game shows, produced in 35 countries and licensed to 45 more. On Tuesday, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire will colonise its 36th country: the Republic. The show's format is so specific that, whatever country you happen to be in, the show looks and sounds basically the same.
Pre-packaged down to every phrase, with a few adjustments for local language and context, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire - like Riverdance - has production cloning down to a fine art.
Two years after the phenomenon was launched in the UK, and one year after it took the US by storm, this monster clone has finally reached the Republic. Why can't we do something original in this country? Why have we always got to imitate blanded out, homogenised, global culture?
You may well ask. But the irony is that the concept behind Who Wants to Be a Millionaire belongs to a Belfast Irishman, Paul Smith, 53-year-old executive producer of WWTBAM who, as managing director of Celadon Productions, controls all 36 versions of WWTBAM with an almost obsessive attention to detail. The original "vague idea" for the show - answer 15 questions, win a million - was brought to Celador by David Briggs, now a producer on the show, but it took three years before the show reached the format which made its debut on ITV/UTV in September 1998.
As in so many other areas, the Irish have the ideas, the creativity and the spunk, they just haven't got the material resources to implement them in this country very often. So if you're Irish and you want to make money, take your ideas abroad. Just look at Tyrone Productions, owned by Moya Doherty and John McColgan - the Riverdance partnership who could write the ultimate self-help guide on how to become millionaires a hundred times over.
With its Irish roots thriving on humanity's insatiable appetite for mammon, Who Wants to Be A Millionaire has become the embodiment of the globalisation of entertainment and culture. Whether you're viewing it in Colombia, Malaysia, Australia, India, Israel, Japan, Norway, France, Switzerland or Slovenia, you will see the same production values - and identical social values. The presumption is that life is meaningless without wealth. And that your life will be transformed if you win a million kroner, or roubles, or deutschmarks.
(The phrase "millionaire" means so much in the Americanised global culture that those countries with currencies in which a million is small fry are persisting in using the word in the show's title, even when what is at stake is actually 50 million drachma or 1,000 million lire or 10 million yen.)
The drama of the show relies on a conspiracy between producer and viewer: you spend the entire show projecting yourself into the role of the contestant, thinking not just "how would I answer that question?" and "how stupid would I feel if I got it wrong?", but, more significantly, fantasising: "what would I do with the million?"
What's a million worth anyway? It'll buy and furnish a modest family home in Dublin, maybe with a flash car, the school fees and a couple of Gucci handbags thrown in. A million means nothing these days.
Not that anyone wins the million, except in the US, where it has been won four times, and in Japan, Portugal, Israel and South Africa, where the top prize has been won once in each country. For most contestants and in most countries, the "million" is like the tantalising prize at the duck-shooting stand at the carnival - it's the portable CD player that people try in vain to win, walking away with a stuffed toy instead.
Most people who have "won" have walked away with the stuffed toys, relatively speaking. In the UK, the biggest prize so far has been £500,000 sterling, won in the sixth series by Peter Lee, an ex-Royal Navy chief petty officer from Cardigan in Wales. In Spain, where the top prize is 50 million pesetas, the biggest winner got 12 million pesetas. In Turkey, where the top prize is 500,000 million lire, the biggest winner got 32,000 million lire.
Yet in the US, where the programme has been running for a year, four people have won the million-dollar prize. Why is this? We all know that Americans are thick, compared to the British. So how is it in the UK, where the programme has been running for twice as long, no one has bagged the million? Do they pitch the questions so that nobody can win, thereby keeping production costs down? Absolutely not, says Lisa Mitchell, PR for Tyrone Productions, makers of the Irish version of the show. She says a team of question producers uses a sophisticated computer software programme to choose questions which are equally difficult in all cultures. The million is there to be won, even if nobody wins it, she asserts.
The other conundrum about WWTBAM is Gay Byrne. Didn't the great showman retire last year? Didn't we all tearfully say goodbye? Didn't we experience the communal catharsis involved in acknowledging his vital contribution to the enlightenment of Irish society?
And now, a year later, he's back, bless him. He has reinvented himself as the most important person in what is inevitably going to be the most important programme on Irish television this season. He has left behind heavy social issues and centred himself in the engine room of the Celtic Tiger.
Chris Tarrant is regarded as the best of the many WWTBAM hosts. In the US, the host is a long-standing talk-show host (sound familiar?), Regis Bowman, who has become so popular that he is known by his first name and markets his own brand of men's shirts and ties. He has also written his autobiography, Who Wants To Be Me?
Having already seen WWTBAM on UTV, the interest for Irish viewers will be in seeing their neighbours and friends sweat under the lights as they are tortured by Gay Byrne, who is a veteran of heart-stopping quizzes after many years on the Gay Byrne Radio Show and the Late Late Show. The thrill for Irish viewers will be that, when the contestant chooses to "phone a friend", thousands of us will run to our phones.
Contestants will be picked in a clinical way. Yesterday, people were asked to ring the programme and answer a pre-set question. Then, 100 people who answered correctly were picked randomly by computer. Over this weekend, question researchers will be ringing the lucky 100 to ask a tie-breaker, such as: "What is the size in square kilometres of the island of Ireland, down to the nearest square kilometre?" The 10 (and two reserves) who give replies which are closest to the correct answer will be invited to the studio.
There's no money in it unless you win, so contestants will be transported to the studio by limousine, coddled by a personal researcher and served a four-course lunch (no wine). They'll be asked to bring two outfits (in case their first choice clashes with the set) and their nerve.
I won't be among them, but when somebody comes up with the programme "Who Wants to be a Billionaire?" call me.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire? is on RTE 1, on Tuesday at 7.30 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. Website: www.rte.ie/millionaire