Mind Of A Millionaire (BBC2)

Taggart (ITV1)

Chris Gorman is worth £45m, has 35 TV sets and his own sound studio. But, Mind Of A Millionaire asked, could you pick him out from a crowd?

The first in the series about contemporary millionaires - and there are 70,000 of them in Britain - took five rich men and three ordinary men to a country house and asked psychologists to pick out the self-made millionaires.

Along the way, the mind experts hoped to identify the qualities that help people from ordinary backgrounds make a mint. Gorman, for instance, grew up in a poor area of Hartlepool and, thanks to bullying, didn't have a particularly happy childhood. At 26, he was selling mobile phones and living on a Glasgow council estate when he persuaded the bank to lend him money to start a phone company. He made his fortune, and has just bought the Gadget Shop chain with plans to open another 50 stores over the next few months.

We met one self-made millionaire whose fortune came from mobile ring tones, and an 18-year-old who'd made £5m by the age of 15 peddling micro-scooters to the masses. He was making vast amounts of lolly while others his age were negotiating over a few quid in pocket money.

The psychologists decided that getting the eight people to throw balls into a net would help them identify the millionaires. Something to do with "harm avoidance" and "risk behaviour" as they chose how far away from the target to stand.

Various facts emerged from the tests. The percentage of dyslexics among millionaires - and criminals, so draw your own conclusion - is higher than among poorer folk. Rich people have boundless energy, steely determination, reckless risk-taking and unshakable self-belief in common. A survey also revealed that 73 per cent of millionaires don't care what the rest of us think of them. They don't need friends anyway, they're too busy counting their money.

The psychologists successfully identified four of the five millionaires. Unlike TV game shows, there was no big cash prize, just the satisfaction of being right.

The Scottish detectives in Taggart always get their man (or woman) but only after much "mudder" has been committed. In the 20th anniversary episode, Penthouse And Pavement, the po-lease were called when two bodies were found in plastic bags. One turned out to be still alive. The other had a smile of his face, his trousers open and was wearing a condom. He was a dead top horror writer and being found in an alley next to a prostitute was good for sales but not his health.

Boss DCI Burke wore a permanent scowl and muttered that a battered victim "looks like a refugee from a Mike Tyson press conference". It was good to see that the personal lives of the four main po-lease officers hadn't improved. "Three divorcees and a celibate homosexual" is how they were described. And not a self-made millionaire among them.

Published: ??/??/2003