The Quiz Masters by Brydon Coverdale

Author:Brydon Coverdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

When I appeared on Millionaire, Rob Fulton and Martin Flood were still two years away from becoming the show’s first seven-figure winners. I find Martin’s self-assurance remarkable; the fact that he would have been disappointed with anything less than a million dollars is hard to comprehend. But, had I put in five years of relentless study, I might have felt the same.

I had barely studied for Millionaire at all. I thought I had pretty good general knowledge and was prepared to rely on that. I tried to memorise some lists when I knew I was going to be on—British monarchs, major Oscar winners, that sort of thing—but it was fairly basic. I also ensured that my phone-a-friends had some of those lists on hand. The show allowed you to nominate three phone-a-friend options, and you could choose which one to use when you were in the hot seat. I picked three people whose knowledge bases, I hoped, wouldn’t overlap too much. My older brother, Chris, was strong in areas in which I was weak, such as science, mythology and astronomy. Ian, the father of my then-girlfriend Kirsty, was well versed in cars, musical theatre and a few other fields that were similarly poor areas for me. But I would only call Chris or Ian if I got stuck on a question that I knew fell in their wheelhouse. For all other enquiries, I would press one: my brother-in-law Paul, who had a broader range of knowledge than anyone I knew, and whom I had trained to appear on Sale of the Century.

With three phone-a-friends in place, my major aim was to reach $32,000, the second of the two ‘safe levels’ designed to encourage contestants to play on. The first safe level was $1000, a consolation prize really, which you reached after answering five easy questions. A further five correct answers earned you $32,000, and five more would win you the million. Contestants could walk away at any time with the money they had won so far; if they played on and answered incorrectly, they fell back to the highest safe level they had reached. This meant that plenty of contestants won $32,000, many crashed back down to $1000 and an unlucky few—Survivor’s Richard Hatch, for example—failed to reach the first safe level. Even at twenty-one years of age, I was not prepared to walk away with $4000, or $8000, or $16,000. This was a rare opportunity to win a life-changing amount of money. I had to get to $32,000; after that, who knew what could happen? On the episode in which I stupidly placed Boy George in Wham!, a woman had been asked, for $64,000, in which year Paul Keating became Australia’s prime minister1. I could have answered that in my sleep. Everything depended on what questions came my way.

It’s an interesting experience watching tapes of myself from twenty years ago, and not only because of my fashion and hair—in this case, a messy spike of early 2000s gel. Even

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