By: Pat Daley

If you're gonna gamble, don't be a sore loser.
  Goshawk Syndicate, a British insurance underwriter, is suing the producers of the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? because the questions are too easy and the contestants too smart. Goshawk actually pays out the prizes over $500,000.
  Living where there's no cable and being too uninterested to spring for satellite, I've never seen the millionaire phenomenon. Nevertheless, I've heard all about it and the new wave of greed it seems to have spawned. It just never occurred to me that prizes might be insurance payouts.
  Money in, money out. That's how things have always worked around here. You produce a game show that's a huge draw, you make big money syndicating it, you use the money to pay out prizes.
  That kind of thinking's for sissies, apparently. Why pay out your own money when you can use somebody else's? Find an insurance underwriter who's willing to gamble that your premiums will more than make up for any money they have to pay out.
  And that's what Valleycrest Productions - a subsidiary of Buena Vista Television, a production unit of the Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC, the program's broadcaster - did. Only now the underwriter doesn't like the odds. The show has awarded three $500,000 and two $1 million prizes since it started last summer.
  A lot of the people who want to be millionaires also think they're being ripped off. Shortly after the program began, the New York Post started getting calls from people complaining that the qualifying questions were ambiguous, the computer cheated, their phone call was disconnected when they got the right answer.
  Everybody's griping about their chances to get rich from a program that's probably making big bucks for those supreme marketers at Disney. The funny thing is the show has paid out just less than $9 million in prizes since it started. That's small potatoes compared to, say, HRDC jobs funding.
  What with the $40 (US) table-top version, $25 (US) hand-held version, and the $19.99 (US) CD-ROM version of the game, they'll make it back in no time.

Pat Daley is a freelance writer and editor in Athlone in Simcoe County, Ontario.

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