What question would I like to be the £1million pound question?

For a while, we used to watch 'Who wants to be a millionaire'; I don't recall ever applying to be on the show (I am too logical- I knew the chance of getting on was very low) but I do recall knowing the answer to one of the first £1m questions ”at which ground does Durham County cricket club play?”. The answer, Chester-le-Street, was known to me not for any knowledge of cricket but because around that time, there was a website chesterlestreet.co.uk (or something similar) which hijacked other busineses' domain names, trying to get money to release them: I think this practice more or less ceased after some legal cases, though maybe it continues.

Today, if I were in the seat, I would like the question to be “in which year was the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia released?”. I write this blog because I see that this film is on Sky Movies tomorrow (1).

Would I blurt out the answer straightaway? Would I freeze, get stage fright, and my mind go blank? Or would I play to the crowd, and waffle and pretend to struggle? I don't know what I would do (though, if made to guess, stage fright would be the bookies' favourite), but I do know that it was in 1993, and that I danced around the lounge holding Tom, to the Bruce Springsteen soundtrack (2)

Now, twenty years later, Aids seems something manageable, a 1990s phenomenon, something we were afraid of at that time. I hope that things we are afraid of now will in twenty years time seem similarly lower in importance.

(1) If reading this in 2033, then please note that in 2013 we were still tied somewhat to TV schedules

(2) Which, within a few seconds of posting this blog, will be on my iPad, thanks to iTunes. But no dancing around with Tom now.

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