Hello, Happy New Year, and welcome to my first multi-part interview for 2026! If you’re a regular visitor here, you’ll know that over the last few months, I’ve been reconnecting with some game show Big Winners, and asking what lasting impacts their Big Wins have had on their lives in the years since they happened. And today I’m happy to welcome 2007 Temptation Grand Champion Blair Martin, who walked away from the show with $603,002 of cash and prizes! 

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SH: Hello, Blair! How are you?

BM: I’m doing well.

SH: Thank you for making the time to do this.

BM: My pleasure. My pleasure.

SH: Now, the genesis of all this was my realization that it’s been 20 years since I had my win on Temptation…

BM: Yes, that’s right.

SH: … And I wrote a little blog post about what it meant to me in the longer term, and I thought, ‘I wonder how other people in this very rare situation feel about this?’

BM: It is a rare situation, it is.

SH: Yeah! And you won Temptation in 2007 – taking home $603,002 of cash and prizes – and I spoke to you for the site 11 years ago now, in 2015.

BM: Yes. When I didn’t have a beard, and I didn’t have long hair and all of that… and Zoom didn’t exist!

SH: No, that’s right. We did it by Skype!

BM: I remember Skype.

SH: RIP Skype.

BM: Yes, RIP Skype.

SH: And back then, obviously, your win was fresher… but now, in 2026, it’s 19 years ago!

BM: Yeah.

SH: So, I’m curious to learn what sort of lasting differences it’s made, if any, for you. But first, can you remind us of what immediate impact your Big Win made on your relationships at the time, in 2007? On friends, family, partner?

BM: Well, at the time I was single and I still am.

SH: Okay.

BM: Two years later, I met someone, and for a little while there in 2009, there were quite a few nasty comments – never said to me, I’ve always found that interesting, but to him – that he was only in it for the money.

SH: Oh, no. I’m sorry to hear that.

BM: And I thought, ‘Well, I’m hardly dripping in millions!’ If you’re talking about keeping someone in an over-the-top lifestyle, well, no, never was. So that was one thing…

SH: Right.

BM: And for my family – which was my parents and my younger brother – not so much. I don’t think he really thought terribly much of it. But my parents said, “Oh, good. You’ll be fairly stable now”. But what I wanted to do was experience the things I had waited maybe 20 years of my life to do, which was to get out of Australia. At that point, I had only ever used my passport three times. But I didn’t really have any plans to go anywhere immediately after the win. But from May 2008, I was like, “I am going to go to the places I want to visit; to go and see and do the things I have always wanted to do.” So I did!

SH: How liberating! That’s great.

BM: And that happened for about two or three years. And I was doing this in a much older capacity than most people would. Most people would have travelled away from their country of birth at a very young age. I never did that. I didn’t have the ability or the opportunity to do that.

SH: Right. May I ask how old you were when you won Temptation?

BM: I would have been 44, not quite 45. So I had been through a bit of life experience before that. And I don’t know if this came up in our earlier conversation, but I’d had an emotional heartbreak. And after that, I made a lot of lifestyle changes, very sudden ones. And around that time, I was out to dinner with friends and one of them said, “I’m going up to Channel 9 tomorrow to audition for Temptation.“ And I said, “Oh, I’ve applied for that, but I haven’t been notified”. But I knew how these things work; you can just rock up, because they never check. And if you turn up and get through the test set of questions, then you get interviewed. And that was a bit of fun. I basically said, “I gate-crashed today”, and they said, “Oh, that’s fine.” So that was one of the things I did around that time: I told myself, “you are worthwhile, you actually have something”. And another one was doing the Story Bridge Adventure Climb, which began in 2005. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m an agoraphobic, and it’s 86 metres from the top to the bottom! But I did it. I went, ‘No, I’ve got to do this,’ because as I said, I just thought ‘I’ve got to change’. And so I got on that climb. I did it. It was exhilarating. I’d changed the way I saw things. And then, nine months later, I’m on Temptation! So there was a series of things happening.

SH: You were reinventing yourself, by the sound of things.

BM: I did. Yeah.

SH: Earlier this afternoon, I watched your final episode of Temptation, and you even referred to the Story Bridge. You made a parallel with that climb and with your journey on Temptation; “just taking it one step at a time, one step at a time”.

BM: Yeah. I haven’t seen it for quite a long time, but to me, it was an experience that had to be lived. I wanted to get everything out of it. And my idea when I was on there was, ‘Yes, I’m me and I’m playing a game, but I’m also Blair Martin, the actor. And I’m also aware of what my role is here. I have a job to do.’

SH: Right. And you mentioned that your attitude was, ‘Oh well, I’m not going to be here again. I might as well suck the marrow out of it’. I’m curious; since Temptation, have you done much more quizzing? Or are you officially “retired” as a quiz show champion? I know I am.

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For Blair’s answer to this question – and many more! – be sure to revisit us here at HowToWinGameShows.com next Tuesday afternoon…

Until then, then!

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