This week, in my chat with Who Wants To be A Millionaire Millionaire Martin Flood, he talks me through his approach to the two biggest questions of all; the half million dollar question, and the question that ultimately won him…………………..

ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

 SH: Getting up to the big questions; given that (the show’s host, Eddie McGuire) had already planted this seed of controversy*, when you were going for the $500 000 and the $1 million, how did you keep your cool when the stakes were so high?

MF: The controversy just seemed to be a weird part to the question so that didn’t come into it at all. I just dismissed it. Every so often a doubt would come to my head – not very often, because I’d visualized it a thousand times – but when a doubt came into my head I would literally – with my right hand – pretend to push it away, as if it was somehow in the air. You can’t stress out about doubts, you’ve just gotta accept them. I was just so confident and at the end of the day, all 15 questions I was familiar with – so I was fortunate. I never got a question where I had no clue at all. The “controversial” comments meant nothing. Playing for the $500,000, I didn’t think about the size of the money… except as a clue to the difficulty level of potential questions. That’s the only thing where the money came into it. I was so confident, not over-confident; over-confidence is a terrible thing.

SH: Yes, because you get sloppy.

MF: Yes, you’re going to start doing silly things. But I was so in my element, getting back there was fantastic. I thought to myself “I’ve only got two questions and I’ve got the two big lifelines”. I’ve got through 13 questions and I only used the audience, so I thought “I’ve got this nailed, there’s no doubt that I’m going to get this”. Everything sort of panned out. I visualized that I’d have a big gap between the two episodes, I visualised that I only had one or two questions left, I visualised that I would have at least two big lifelines. I was sitting there and everything was coming out exactly how I imagined it. One funny thing I did; there were very rarely questions on borders of countries but I thought “I really need to learn borders”. So I bought a globe, and every time I’d go past it, I would have a look at different things. Strangely, I remember looking at the Caspian Sea and thinking “I’ve never heard a question on the Caspian Sea in all the years of going to trivia, all the pre-recorded shows that I’ve watched. That’s going to come up one day”. And with that thought, every time I walked past the globe, I checked the Caspian Sea over and over again. Anyway, what question comes up?

MF: I took the same approach whether it’s an easy question or a hard question; I go through the same routine, no matter what. My routine was to sit there, think about it, go through all the countries in my head, add them all up.  As soon as I saw the question I thought it was five, but I thought okay, I’m gonna go through it. And I talked it through and said “well, there’s five”. And Eddie said “you have your 50/50 or a Phone-A-Friend. You got any friends who might have an atlas or something like that?” I was quite surprised that Eddie was insisting I phone a friend, because I was quite confident of the answer. Anyway, I rang Dave and Dave had my globe and he went straight to whatever was on the computer and most of them were coming up with 5. Then Eddie goes “Dave said 5, you said 5, you waited 5 years for this, and you had 5 weeks’ break”…. So I locked in 5.

And it was. With that, Martin scored himself a cool $500 000, and paved the way for the million dollar question… which will be revealed next week!

* See last week’s post.