ITV and Radio Competition Odds: What Are Your Chances on This Morning, Heart and Smooth?

Every weekday, ITV's daytime shows offer a cash prize that would change most people's year, and the Global radio stations (Heart, Capital, Smooth, Classic FM) do the same between songs. The entry costs about £2. The question nearly everyone asks is the one the broadcasters never answer: what are the odds?

The honest answer is that nobody outside the broadcaster can tell you, because the number of entries is never published, and in a prize draw the odds are simply one in the number of entries. But that is not the end of it. Below is what the rules do tell you, how to work out what the odds would have to be for an entry to be good value, the free way in that most people miss, and the one ITV and Global draw where the odds can be calculated.

Why Nobody Publishes the Odds

A lottery has fixed odds because the game is fixed: six numbers from 59 is 1 in 45 million whether ten people play or ten million. A broadcaster's prize draw is different. One winner is drawn from everyone who entered, so your chance is one divided by the number of entries, and that number is not known until the lines close.

It could be published afterwards. It is not. ITV's terms and Global's rules both describe how the winner is chosen, and neither says how many entries a draw received.

Compare that with the prize competition operators we track on Competition Showroom. Nearly all of them cap the number of tickets and print the cap on the page, so the worst-case odds are known before you pay. That one published number is what makes a draw comparable, and it is the thing TV and radio competitions leave out.

How ITV's Competitions Work

The big cash prizes on Good Morning Britain, Lorraine, This Morning and Loose Women are often run as a single prize draw promoted across several shows, which is why the same prize can follow you through the morning. The structure is consistent:

• Paid entry by premium-rate phone call, text message, or online at itv.com/win. Entries are typically £2 or more, plus your network charge for calls and texts.
• Free entry by post. You send your name and phone number to the PO box given in that competition's terms. The address changes from one competition to the next.
• A cap on paid entries per phone number, set in each competition's terms.
• One draw. Paid and postal entries go into the same draw, and the winner is the first eligible entry drawn at random.

ITV's handling of paid entries is independently checked. Its broadcast licences require a third party to verify the systems used for premium-rate competitions and votes, and ITV publishes a statement each year confirming it. The statement covering 2025, signed in June 2026, names MCP Insight as the verifier. That is assurance that entries are handled fairly. It tells you nothing about how many there were.

How Heart, Capital and Smooth Competitions Work

Heart, Capital, Smooth, Classic FM, LBC, Radio X and Gold are all owned by Global, and their competitions run on shared rules. Global's own guidance on its paid-entry services says:

• The cost is shown at the point of entry. Your network may add its own charge to a text, typically 10p to 20p, so a £2 entry can cost £2.10 or more.
• Entry is by text or online. Some competitions are free, some are paid, and some have both a paid and a free route.
• Winners are selected at random by an automated, independent system from all entries, whichever route they came in by.
• Each competition has its own entry limit, set out in its rules.

The biggest of them, Heart's Make Me A Millionaire, shows why these odds are so hard to pin down. In its 2024 run, a text cost £2 plus your network rate and online packages started at £2. Listeners who won a round earned a place in the final, and the final had ten places, so a finalist had a 1 in 10 chance at £1 million. That last step is the only part with known odds. The chance of becoming a finalist depended on how many people entered each round, which was never published.

One practical warning from Heart's own FAQ for that game: entries made while listening on catch-up might not count, but you would still be charged.

What the Odds Would Need to Be

You cannot calculate the odds, but you can calculate what they would have to be for an entry to be fair value. On Competition Showroom we use the Value Ratio: total entry revenue divided by the prize. For a broadcast competition that is:

Value Ratio = number of paid entries × entry price ÷ prize

Take a £100,000 prize at £2 an entry, as an illustration:

• 50,000 paid entries: the broadcaster takes exactly what it gives away. Odds 1 in 50,000, Value Ratio 1.0.
• 125,000 paid entries: odds 1 in 125,000, Value Ratio 2.5. That is the median for the capped prize competitions we track.
• 500,000 paid entries: odds 1 in 500,000, Value Ratio 10.
• 1,000,000 paid entries: odds 1 in a million, Value Ratio 20.

These are worked examples, not estimates of any real competition. The point is the shape. For a £100,000 prize to be as good a deal as a typical online prize competition, it would need to attract no more than about 125,000 paid entries. Whether a competition promoted on national television for weeks stays under that is something only the broadcaster knows.

If a broadcaster ever does state the number of entries, the sum takes ten seconds, and our odds calculator will do it for you.

The Free Way In

A prize draw that charges for entry has to offer a free route as well, or it would be an illegal lottery under the Gambling Act 2005. That is why the terms of ITV's draws include a postal address, and why some Global competitions have a free online route alongside the paid one.

A stamp is not free, but the law treats ordinary postage as a normal cost of communication, not a payment to enter. None of it goes to the broadcaster.

The details that matter:

• Use the address in that competition's terms. It changes, and an entry sent to an old PO box is wasted.
• Check the postal closing date. It is usually a few days after the phone lines close, but the entry has to arrive by then.
• Follow the format exactly. The terms say what to include, normally your name and a contact phone number.
• A postal entry is one entry. It has the same chance as one paid entry. The paid routes often come with bundle offers, so a heavy paid entrant can hold more entries than you, but each one has cost them money.

We keep a guide to free postal entry for UK prize competitions, and list draws that cost nothing at all on our free entry competitions page.

The One ITV and Global Draw With Calculable Odds

The Birthday Draw, the weekly £1 million prize draw ITV and Global run together, is the exception. You match a date, a letter and a colour against a winning combination, so the odds are fixed by the number of possible combinations and not by the number of entrants. From its terms we work the jackpot out at about 1 in 11.4 million per entry, with about a 1 in 365 chance of winning something. The full working, the prize tiers and the free postal route are in The Birthday Draw odds explained.

How This Compares With Capped Competitions

The alternative to an unknown number of entries is a known one. A capped prize competition states the maximum number of tickets, so you can see the worst case before you enter:

• A cash draw capped at 5,000 tickets can never be worse than 1 in 5,000.
• If it closes at 60% sold, your real odds were about 1 in 3,000.
• The Value Ratio can be calculated in advance, so two draws can be compared like for like.

We rank every live one. See cash competitions for the same kind of prize the broadcasters offer, low odds competitions for the smallest ticket pools, and the best odds league table for everything ranked by value.

The Honest Take

TV and radio competitions are properly run. Winners are drawn at random, the systems are independently verified, and real people win real money. But you are asked to pay £2 for a chance nobody will put a number on, and the size of the audience suggests the number is large.

If you enjoy them, enter by post and it costs you a stamp. If you want to know your chances before you pay, that information exists elsewhere: capped competitions publish it on every draw.

Sources: ITV's competition terms and its Annual Statement on Participation TV 2025; Global's guidance on premium rate text and interactive services; Heart's Make Me A Millionaire 2024 terms and FAQs. Checked on 14 November 2026. Prices and entry limits vary by competition, so always read the terms of the one you are entering.