When Channel 4 quietly slipped its brand-new game show – Million Pound Shot hosted by Bradley Walsh – into its primetime Sunday night slot just days before transmission, eagle-eyed viewers suspected there was more to the story.
Teased as a quiz show with a big twist, the mysterious title had received barely any publicity in the run-up to its premiere despite having Walsh attached, while those who’d done some digging saw that it was being made by a production company best known for making “fascinating documentaries and extraordinary stunts”. Was this a new show from illusionist Derren Brown? Yet another Channel 4 TV experiment? Or perhaps a Halloween-themed prank? As it turns out, the reality was much scarier.
Million Pound Shot’s first 30 minutes played out last night like a regular game show, except contestants had to bet their own money in order to win big prizes. An unfazed Walsh initially welcomed three people onto the show, with only one enthusiastic man called Reece – who had to insert his debit card into a machine on camera to deposit £500 for the first question – actually chosen to play the full game. As you can imagine, it didn’t end well: despite losing £2,000, Reece was coaxed into playing again, with Walsh offering various “bonus balls” of free money and the audience cheering him on, before ultimately ending up £6,000 in the red. “I have an overdraft we could go into,” he tearfully told Walsh as the camera panned to his distraught partner in the studio audience.
It would have been an incredibly uncomfortable watch for those who’d just happened to flick over to Channel 4 – particularly when one audience member interrupted filming to angrily raise her concerns about the show’s concept as a sobbing Reece fled the set, desperately apologising to his distressed partner. One abrupt ad break later and Walsh was back to reveal that it was, in fact, all a hoax. The contestants, their families and the audience heckler were all paid actors, but the rest of the studio audience weren’t in on it (interestingly, some of them had tried to shout down the heckler during her outburst, with one telling her: “He didn’t have to do it!”).
Million Pound Shot was actually, Walsh revealed, an immersive look at the techniques gambling companies use to keep their customers playing – and therefore paying – even when the fun stops. Whether it’s having players use “bet balls” to represent cash, instead of actual money, in online games or disguising losses as wins, betting companies deploy a number of tactics and it works; the show revealed that £17.5bn was lost by British customers to gambling last year.
What started as a game show soon became a hard-hitting documentary, with the actors involved and various experts explaining the thinking behind the gambling companies’ methods. Just as “Reece” (played by George Reid) was asked to push a buzzer to stop a wheel from spinning in the hopes of it landing on the £1m prize, gambling businesses give the illusion of control to their customers when that’s not the case at all. “If you give gamblers choice around things, picking numbers, choosing cards, it really influences their confidence in the outcome,” Dr Steve Sharman, an expert in psychology, told Walsh on screen.
It’s the same with free bet offers. Throughout the show, Walsh offered Reece the chance to win free bonus balls alongside those he’d paid for – mirroring the various £5, £10 or even £20 free bet offers gambling brands promote. Will Prochaska, a campaigner for Gambling Reform, explained that over half of people who are addicted to gambling have said that they’ve been “lured back in with a free bet”, and that those who experience gambling harm are nine times more likely to be offered a free bet than a regular gambler. “You wouldn’t offer out another pint to an alcoholic, would you?” Aneurin Ferguson, who played another contestant on the show, told the audience.
When you thought the statistics couldn’t get bleaker, Prochaska then revealed why we’re constantly bombarded by betting ads: over £1bn is spent on gambling advertising to bring in new customers and replace the ones who can’t sustain their losses. “Over half of the sector’s profits come from just 5 per cent of customers who are losing large sums of money,” he said. “Some of those people will get help to stop. Some of those people will turn to crime. Some of those people will take their lives.”
The latter almost happened to former cricketer and school teacher Patrick Foster, who was the real-life inspiration for Reece. Explaining his story on camera, Patrick spoke about becoming addicted to gambling at university, finding that the slot machines replicated “the sort of rush and buzz that I get from sport”. Over the next 13 years, he gambled in some way, shape or form every day, which became even easier when many gambling businesses moved online (”I had a betting shop and a casino in my pocket”).
For him, it was the free bets that kept drawing him back in – and by 2018, he was nearly £300,000 in debt with bank loans, credit cards and payday loans, and hiding it from his partner Charlotte. He began asking the parents of his students for money and became the subject of an investigation by the school. “I tried to gamble my way out of the problem, I did it all day and all night,” he said, revealing that he decided to bet his winnings, £58,000, on a race at the Cheltenham World Cup. “If I win all the money back, life can continue. If that horse didn’t win, I was going to go and do the unthinkable and kill myself,” he said. His horse didn’t win, but thankfully Charlotte stopped him before he could go any further.
Now an advocate for education around gambling addiction, Patrick is still in “a huge amount of debt” but won’t ever go back to the slots. “The gambling industry has an awful lot to answer for,” Charlotte told the show. “They know that if someone has lost a lot of money, if you give them a free bet, they’ll just go straight back into it. They know exactly what they’re doing.”
The harrowing hour of television came to an end with a visibly emotional Walsh questioning whether the manipulative tactics shown in the programme should continue to be allowed. “The chances are they could be coming for you next,” he warned. In fact, in just an hour’s time, they’ll be coming for viewers of The Chase, the ITV show hosted by Walsh that’s also sponsored by Gala Bingo. The brand was not singled out, although its parent company Entain (which also owns Coral and Ladbrokes) was, alongside Evoke (owner of William Hill) and Flutter (owner of Paddy Power and Sky Bet).
Million Pound Shot ended with various rights of reply statements from the gambling industry, with the Gambling Commission saying they have “tightened rules on free bets” and the Betting and Gambling Council saying their members operate “in one of the most tightly regulated gambling markets in the world”. Coral and Ladbrokes’ owner Entain said its customers only receive promotional offers if they opt in to marketing, and that it strongly rejects any suggestion that Coral deliberately targets customers showing signs of gambling harm with free bets. Evoke also denied any suggestions that it disregards consumer protections to keep customers playing regardless of the potential risks. And Flutter said that the company takes its “obligations incredibly seriously” in the “highly regulated market” and that “like any other business, their brands offer promotions to attract customers and free bets are part of that offer”.
Despite the gambling companies’ protests, the show’s findings still serve as a stark warning about the industry – even if they were initially wrapped up in the form of a shiny new quiz show. While some may object to being tricked into watching a gambling documentary, once you’ve witnessed a live studio audience cheer for a desperate man to sink further into his overdraft just to play a game, it’s hard to deny that this conversation needs to happen.
‘Million Pound Shot’ is available to stream on Channel 4