Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has certainly kept the edge of the seat moments coming since it returned to screens.
Not only have we had our latest £1,000,000 winner but equally some pretty dramatic moments in which hopefuls bagged a life-changing sum of money – but just missed out on the jackpot.
However the show isn’t always easy – and sometimes even Jeremy Clarkson is left stumped by the questions.
As happened in the most recent edition of the show, when he was unable to help a contestant stuck on a teaser about lakes.
Sunday night’s edition of the ITV show saw data analyst Natalie Waldegrave step into the hot seat and fair breeze through the first part of the competition, soaring all the way to the £32,000 mark with just a little help from her lifelines.
However it was the next question which proved problematic. To advance to the £64,000 mark Natalie was faced with the following: ‘Which of these popular tourist lakes is the largest by area?’
The four options were Lake Windemere, Lake Garda, Lake Tahoe and Lake Titicaca.
Natalie admitted: ‘Geography’s not a particularly good subject for me,’ mulling over the answers before admitting she was ‘really not sure at all’.
However, with few lifelines remaining she opted to ‘Ask the host’ – turning to Jeremy Clarkson for help. Except he wasn’t sure of the answer either.
‘I haven’t been to Titicaca but the one thing I know about it is it is phenomenally deep,’ Jeremy said, before admitting he had a water-skiing record on Lake Windemere.
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None of this knowledge helped though, as after more consideration he toldNatalie: ‘This is a nightmare question.’
‘I’ve got to be honest with you Natalie, I would not be able to say because what would you lose? If I give you an answer and you go for it you’d lose £31,000 if you were wrong and I couldn’t have that on my conscience.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he concluded. ‘I’d love to be able to help you out but that is my final answer.’
Ultimately Natalie chose to use her final lifeline – calling her brother Daniel, who also didn’t know the answer – before opting to bow out of the game with £32,000.
Jeremy meanwhile, added: ‘I don’t think there’s anyone in the room who could answer that – or the world.’
But would you have been able to get it right?
Well, as Jeremy revealed, the correct answer was actually Lake Titicaca – Windemere is the largest lake in England, Garda the largest in Italy, while Tahoe is the largest Alpine lake in North America.
However Titicaca, which straddles the border between Peru and Bolivia in the Andes Mountains, dwarfs them all at an enormous 8,400 square kilometres. And at 3,812 m above sea level it’s also the highest large lake in the world.
Having opted to take the money, Natalie admitting if she had taken a wild guess that would have been the answer she’d have chosen.
Which in turn would have guaranteed her going home with £64,000 – as she’d set her safety net at that sum. ‘Never mind,’ she told the host, who admitted that he didn’t blame her for not taking the risk.
Elsewhere in the series, other contestants have faced more mixed fortunes.
One recent contestant, Jessye Olver crashed and burned at the £8,000 mark on a science poser, realising her mistake too late.
The question in that instance was: ‘What is the second-most abundant gas in the Earth’s atmosphere: A) Argon B) Oxygen C) Carbon dioxide or D) Nitrogen?’
After phoning a friend she went with her first instinct – which was carbon dioxide – but the correct answer was oxygen, a mistake which cost her as she left the contest with just £1,000.
As Jeremy Clarkson quipped: ”The correct answer, mercifully, is oxygen or we’d all be in a bit of bother.’