Hello! When we left off last week, Alex was telling me that he regularly competed in pub trivia nights around the time of his very big – and very public – game show win on Million Dollar Minute…

==============================================================SH: Did you win every week?

AD: We won a fair bit. I have to say we probably won half the time, but we also weren’t the biggest team in numbers. So we did lose too. We were trying to qualify for some end-of-season regional thing. And we got pipped at the end by a team of very smart, I think teachers or librarians. So I was very happy that they got the win.

SH: That’s good. Not long after my Temptation win, I got to know Martin Flood, who won a million dollars on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? He would invite me to trivia nights with his pals. And it started to get a bit uncomfortable because other teams would see Martin and me walk in and they knew our credentials. And so we got some really dirty looks and at one stage, even the trivia quiz master was having trouble pronouncing a word. So he brought it down to me and Martin to get the correct pronunciation! So yeah, we weren’t exactly inconspicuous or incognito. So after a while, I felt a bit awkward about that. Do you live in the unit that you bought with your winnings?

AD: I do, yeah. And as a result, I do think of Million Dollar Minute pretty regularly and think, ‘thank you – thank you for helping me get a footing in life’.

SH: Yeah, a roof over your head! Fantastic. What has your Big Win enabled you to do over the last 11 years that you wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise?

This is the Big Win we’re talking about (from ‘Million Dollar Minute’, in 2014).

AD: Well, I’d love to say “travel the world” or something crazy, but I just wasn’t the type of person to do that. I did want to take my family on a trip, something big to mark the milestone… But they’re pretty much like me. They’re just like staying at home, chilling. So that didn’t eventuate, but the intentions were there.

SH: Yeah, but you’re similar to Russell Cheek, who’s an actor, who won Sale of the Century. I’m not sure what age he was when he won, but he was able to buy – with his winnings in 1992 – a unit in Bondi. And he still lives there 32 years later.

AD: Is there a correlation between people being very creative and being on quiz shows? Because for some of the names you’ve mentioned, and yourself, it does seem to be a bit of a common denominator, of of acting and the creative pursuits.

SH: Yes, I think there definitely is. There’s Matt Parkinson, comedian and actor, Russell Cheek’s an actor, Blair Martin, (who I’m speaking to next) is an actor, and there’s me… I think actors are good at learning things and memorising things. And not in any way fazed by the studio and bright lights. They – that is, we – are not just comfortable in front of people and comfortable with public speaking and being under scrutiny; we bloody love it! Time and time again, when I was on the show, the people either side of me were really out of their element in a TV studio, and I think that might’ve given me a very slight edge because I was very familiar with TV studios and the routine of making television.

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And that’s where we’ll leave it today – join us back here next week, when we’ll wrap it all up on a positive note! Until next Tuesday!