Hello!

As you’ll remember from last week, Ryan had applied to be a contestant on Au Suivant, a French Canadian quiz show, somewhat similar to Australia’s Millionaire Hot Seat. He’d made an audition video and sent it in, and subsequently received an invitation to do an audition / interview for the show on FaceTime.

WILL the interview go well?

WILL the contestant selectors take a shine to him?

WILL Ryan be selected as a contestant on the show?

Let’s just say that there’s a lot riding on the outcome of this interview.

Now, I don’t want to give too much away, or spoil that outcome for you… so I’ll just let this picture do that.

Now read on!

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The day came. I put on a nice outfit, sat down and got ready. Two things happened that weren’t really to my advantage. First, I put the phone down to put FaceTime on horizontal and all of a sudden, my two-person interview panel became two half-faces! The next bump came for my very first question; “What is the main ingredient in hummus?” I knew it was chickpeas but I couldn’t find the French word…

My interviewers said “Tu peux le dire en Anglais!” (You can say it in English!)

Which I did… and I thought might be the end. However, it was not and I used that to my advantage. One of my interviewers told me to just say a funny answer if I didn’t know the real answer. I decided to roll with it; I figured it might not go anywhere and so I should treat it as a fun learning experience. Several times during the interview I made the interviewers laugh. In addition, the personality section went well.

That was late April.

The first Friday of June was a particularly difficult day at work. I had a long road trip planned for that evening, so my mind was probably somewhere else as I checked my email on my phone. I read the first line of the new email that had arrived.

« …vous avez été sélectionnée comme candidate pour la prochaine saison d’Au Suivant ! »

After years of trying, I had finally made it! I was going to be on a French-Canadian game show! I was pumped. Following that long drive, I sat at breakfast the next morning at my hotel and ordered the Au Suivant board game online.

For the next two months, I played the game incessantly with friends. I dug out my old copy of Qui Veut Etre Un Millionaire? to use as flashcards. I recruited a friend who had been on both Jeopardy and Millionaire to conduct Skype sessions twice a week. I was going to be ready for this.

I found myself at Radio-Canada in early August. We were led down into our green room where we went over the rules and contestant agreements. I talked with the other contestants (in my group there was someone who had been on five game shows and another person who’d been on eleven!), and generally just relaxed.

About a half hour before the show we were led onto set to practice where we should stand, where we should look and where we should exit, if luck was not on our side. It was at this time that my friends arrived to sit in the audience and I was pretty excited. This was the first time in a long while that I had a rooting section! We were then led back to the green room.

We were just shooting the breeze when Stephane, the host, came in to say hello! He gave us some sound advice – keep it moving but have fun! – and talked to each of us individually to see what we would talk about on air before we started our round of questions… that is IF we got to play. The structure of the show doesn’t guarantee that everyone gets to play, although we were told that if we didn’t get to play, they would try to bring us back for a future episode.

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Next week, as this three-part post concludes, Ryan meets up with Stephane again, when he takes to the stage to play Au Suivant! 

See you next Tuesday!