Charismatic Frank Edoho has anchored the
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (WWTBAM) TV
game show for ten years. As Nigeria celebrates
the show’s ten-year landmark, Frank shared
his memorable and intriguing moments on the
show.
Before TV programme, Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire, who was Frank Edoho?
Frank was an On-Air-Personality. I cut my
teeth in Radio Nigeria, Metro FM; they sent me
on training in year 2000. I came back to
become a radio announcer. I studied every
aspect of broadcasting; news, news reading,
commentary, documentary and voice over
presentation. So, before I started “ Who Wants
To Be A Millionaire”, I was into radio
broadcasting. I was an announcer on Metro
FM. 97.6 and it was a fabulous pedestal that
prepared me for upcoming projects in
broadcasting. Little did I know that just around
the corner, WWTBAM will come calling. So, I
was just a lesser known radio announcer, and I
enjoyed that anonymity until WWTBAM came
on board, and everything changed.
Asides WWTBAM, what other things that
occupy your time?
I do everything related to broadcasting; I do
program production and I take myself to be
more of a producer than a presenter because
in broadcasting, presenting is a lazy job.
Everybody does it for you. In WWTBAM for
instance, we have all the structures in place;
we have the studio, the executive producer, we
have a director and we even have a sponsor,
MTN, which provides the finance.
Everything is set and all the presenter has to
do is to walk in, sit down and say ‘Good
evening Nigeria’. So, I consider myself as a
producer, but not on a very large scale,
especially on TV. Radio is my first love and I
am into lots of radio projects, events,
production projects and consultancy.
WWTBAM is already 10 years. Considering the
fact that many TV game shows didn’t last this
long, how would you describe the game show,
with respect to its consistency?
Well, the major factor that has made the show
consistent for ten years, are the people behind
it; they pay attention to details. The producers
always say we should adopt the strategy of
continuous improvement, and that’s what we
have been doing. Every time a season ends, we
do a review. We tell ourselves that we are
doing well, but we could be better. So, in
which areas do we need to do more work? We
do a post mortem of the penultimate season
and we use that as a benchmark for the next
show. It is very challenging because many
people have been watching this show for ten
years and the show has become a template. We
try to tweak the variables of the show, so that
every season turns out to be like a brand new
season.
Let’s talk about the values that this show
offers: Entertainment, education and
empowerment. Which of these would you
describe as the strongest point of the show?
I think the show’s strongest point is its
underlying philosophy that you have to work
for what you earn. There is no free lunch,
especially for the Nigerian youth who don’t
believe in putting work into any prospect. They
want to drive that flashy car but not prepared
to put in any effort. It’s okay to dream but you
need to work for it. I think they get off the
rail towards their destination and toe the
dubious direction. It looks like it’s easy to
answer fifteen questions and get ten million
naira. But when you see the drama and what
goes into it, you will know this is work. So, ten
million naira doesn’t come easy, no wonder
we’ve only had one ten million naira winner.
So, I think the philosophy of the show is that
we want to entertain, we want to educate but
most importantly, we want to pass on the
subliminal message that you have to work, to
earn the prize.
Could you share some of the memorable
moments you have had as the producer of
WWTBAM?
I have two memorable moments; the first was
when Aruoma Ufodike clinched the ultimate
prize of ten million naira. WWTBAM is
designed to safeguard fraud. I see the
questions for the first time when everyone is
seeing it. I don’t have fore knowledge of the
questions, for security reasons. Also, my
demeanor will show that I am seeing the
question for the first time. And when the
questions pop up, the answer is not there. So
when I see the question and the options,
sometimes I am mulling in my head, what the
answer is. So the day the ten million naira was
won, I knew the answer to the question, but I
had to keep my composure because I knew we
were on the brink of history.
I had a dead pan expression on my face, a
poker face that I had developed for the past
ten years. The guy phoned a friend, the friend
said he was one hundred percent sure, that
was the answer. Aruoma said he trusts his
friend, so I locked it in and said you know if
you are wrong, you stand to lose N4.75m. The
guy said ok. So I locked it in and he won
N10m! The episode where I had the other
memorable moment was not aired. The
contestant was acting like he had mental
issues. I will ask him a question; he will stare
right into my eyes and ask me the same
question, instead of responding with an
answer. Initially, I thought he was trying to be
funny, but after a while, I knew something was
amiss. Those were the two moments.
From your experience anchoring the game
show for 10 years, do you subscribe to the
general opinion that our youth are not
interested in reading as it was the case back in
the days?
It is the solution to the problem that has now
become the problem. Let me put it this way:
those days we didn’t have a lot of technology,
we didn’t have social media and we didn’t have
many distractions, so one of the ways you
could entertain yourself, is to carry a novel by
Jeffery Archer and read. The ladies will pick
Mills and Boon. I used to read pace setters,
when we had writers like Helen Ovbiageli who
wrote for Vanguard Newspaper. Since we didn’t
have electricity to indulge in a lot of things, all
you had to do was pick up a book and read;
and we borrowed novels, swapped and read.
Then technology came and took over and we
now have many distractions. We must have
missed it somewhere along the line, because
even in the developed societies, they still read
and their culture enables it. Someone in the
UK is going to work in the train, what does he
use to pass time? He opens a book and reads.
Now, in Nigeria you are in a hold up, you are
driving yourself because you can’t afford a
driver. How are you going to read? You get to
work at 8 am and you work till 7pm, especially
in Lagos. On weekends, you just sleep or
maybe you go to the cinema and see a movie
and then before you know it, it is Monday
again. Our lifestyle doesn’t allow us to read,
it’s a deterrent.
Talking about sponsorship, MTN has been the
sole sponsor of WWTBAM for quite a
considerable length of time. Does part of the
credit for its consistency, go to the sponsors?
Yes, let’s give MTN credit, because for a
company to realize the potential of a
programme, they must have tried it for a
period of time. You know they can say, “our
job is done here, we have tried on this
sponsorship, let’s just leave it, since we are
already synonymous with WWTBAM”. But they
still insist that even though it’s been on for ten
years, there is still potential in it. WWTBAM is
the longest airing game show on Nigerian
Television, and MTN has made it so. We only
hope that other corporate bodies will follow
suit in other aspects like entertainment.
Whether you like it or not, entertainment is a
vehicle for change. A lady approached me
sometime back and asked me to talk to her
son, I asked her why. She said the boy is very
stubborn but she needs me, to come to her
house and talk to the boy. He is intelligent but
he doesn’t read and he is wayward. But
anytime WWTBAM is showing on TV, he is very
attentive. So I said alright, and I paid the boy a
visit one evening. When the boy saw me, he
couldn’t believe it! I started talking to him. The
mother called me two weeks ago and told me
about the boy’s progress. Maybe I had
something to do with it, but the boy changed.
So that’s why I said entertainment is a vehicle
of change in the society but people haven’t
realized it. When we started WWTBAM, it was
quite challenging. There were many slots for
sponsorship, but very few organizations turned
up. When MTN came, all that changed. MTN
saw all the potential and said they will take all
the slots and they are still taking everything till
today. So without MTN, the show wouldn’t
have been this massive.
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