Chris Tarrant's Great Pretender

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For other uses, see The Great Pretender (disambiguation).

Chris Tarrant's Great Pretender
Format	Game show
Presented by	Chris Tarrant
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Production
Running time	60 minutes (inc. advertisements)
Broadcast
Original channel	ITV1
Original run	November 5, 2007 – Present

Chris Tarrant's Great Pretender (originally The Great Pretender) is a British daytime game show airing on the ITV Network, presented by Chris Tarrant. The show started airing 5pm on November 5, 2007. The shows is broadcast Mondays to Fridays at 5:00-6:00pm on ITV1 across England, Scotland and Wales. In Northern Ireland the ITV region UTV (Ulster Television) broadcasts the show at 4:30-5:30pm Mondays to Fridays usually one episode behind that which was broadcast across the rest of the UK. The reason for the time difference in the Northern Ireland region is that UTV have a lifestyle programme at 5:30pm called UTV Life followed by their regional news at 6:00pm, unlike the other ITV1 regions which just have their regional news at 6:00pm. This ensure viewers in Northern Ireland do not miss out on network 5pm shows as they used to until late 2006.

[edit] Format

Chris Tarrant's Great Pretender is a bluffer's game where one contestant will win the contents of the cash jackpot, before the show even finishes. However, the catch is holding on to the cash without fellow contestants snatching it. If the opponents correctly guess the winner at the end of the show, they steal the prize money from the winner sharing it amongst themselves, leaving the winner with nothing. The game concludes at the final round when the group must guess who they think is The Great Pretender. Incorrectly guessing the Great Pretender, or if the vote is equally split through undecisiveness among contestants will mean the actual Pretender will walk away with the entire cash jackpot.

[edit] Similar formats

The show's format is similar to that of Ant & Dec's PokerFace, where similarly contestants must bluff each other in order to walk away with the cash jackpot. The main differences between the shows are that in PokerFace, contestents need to bluff other contestants into thinking they're doing well (regardless of whether they're doing well or not), in order to stay in game and hopefully win the jackpot, whereas in The Great Pretender, contestants' only hope of success is to do the opposite, by bluffing fellow contestants into thinking they're doing poor in order to win the jackpot themselves.