Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? contestant accidentally exposes filming secret after show finished while she was in hot seat

One contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire has exposed a secret behind the filming of the popular quiz show. Watch as she reveals a trick of the game:

You all know how the show goes by now, 15 questions of increasing difficulty where if you get the right answer you keep going and if you don't then you're out.

If you get to a certain point you get to keep some of the money you've made and you can take the money and walk away at any time if you like, but to help you keep trying there's a bunch of lifelines.

You can ask the audience, get rid of two wrong answers to knock your choice down to a straight 50/50 chance, ring up a clever friend and hope they know, or ask host Jeremy Clarkson if he's got any idea what the answer is.

Get all of the questions right and you get to walk away as a freshly minted millionaire, just hope that nobody in the audience was conveniently coughing whenever the right answer was being read out.

Oh yes, and definitely don't get the first question wrong or you'll look like an absolute wally.

ITV

As for a behind the scenes peek at how they make the show, one contestant on Millionaire let the cat out of the bag when the klaxon sounded to signal the end of the episode.

Clarkson asked Maria King 'you know what that means?', to which the proper answer would be that it's the end of the show and thus time for everyone to go home and come back to do this another day.

ITV

Instead, Maria said: "I'll have to go and get changed. I'm not supposed to say that, am I?"

Her comment exposes one of the filming secrets behind the show that they film multiple episodes at the same time and just do costume changes once they've got enough footage to fill up a whole episode.

It wouldn't really make sense for them to just get everyone together and film for an hour a week, only to bring everyone back again for the next round of quizzing.

Luckily everyone found her comment very funny, and host Clarkson played along by saying he'd see her much sooner than the audience watching at home on TV.

He said: "That's exactly what it means, because that's absolutely right, I will be seeing you in about an hour's time but for as far as the viewers are concerned you are going home, you are going to be panicking 'oh no' and then we will see you next week.

"So you are absolutely right that is the end of the show, you do have to go and get changed, and Maria will be back next time, it says on the autocue, to see if she can get further than - where are you - £4,000."