Hello and welcome to the antepenultimate instalment of my epic interview with David Poltorak. When we left off last week, it was mid-2020, and one of the producers of Beat The Chasers was trying to tempt David into signing up for the show…

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DP: I wasn’t sure; I don’t think I said yes straight away. But it wouldn’t have taken me long to say yes. And so, she then sent me links (that everybody would have been given access to) of the UK version of the show. And I just thought, “F*** – this is hard!” But there was one YouTube of one winner on the UK show, who won everything. But she actually got a couple wrong. And I thought, “Well, I knew the ones she got wrong”. I didn’t know all the ones she got right, but on balance, I would have done the same as her. So that instilled me with a certain confidence that it was possible… So I said yes. My fingers were crossed that I would do well, because if I didn’t, it was going to be a really bad look.

SH: Yeah, your reputation!

DP: For what that’s worth. But I convinced myself that if I lost, it wouldn’t necessarily be catastrophic, because it was such a hard format. I thought because of my background, I’m going to have to go up against all four Chasers. I don’t have an option really of going below that. But interestingly, when I got to the studio that day of recording, one of the producers said to all of us, “Look, I know most of you are smart, you’ve been on other shows, you’ve done well, you’re here to win money. But everybody has thought like that, and nobody has won the big money. You might want to temper your ambitions and at least go home with something. We’ve had some people who walked away with low-level prizes, but nobody has taken the most, because the really good ones amongst you have gone for the most … and they’ve all bombed out.”

And so all that day, I had producers and PA’s asking me “What do you think you’ll do? What do you think you’ll do?” And after that little producer talk, I remember thinking “Maybe I shouldn’t be so ambitious. Maybe I should just go for a lower amount because I’d like to leave with something…” And I was on the last record day, and I was one of the last to be done. I guess they’d held me strategically in reserve so they could play with me, in terms of how much they offered me.

SH: Right.

DP: So, when the time came for me to go onto the set, they’re probably thinking, “We don’t have a big winner yet. We want one big winner. This is our only chance; we’d better offer him a lot of money. Because he said he’s only gonna go for three Chasers. And we want him to go for four.” And when they flashed up $150,000 on the screen, I couldn’t believe it. The guy before me, his top offer was just $70,000. And I thought, based on the English show, where they offer up to 100,000 (admittedly, pounds), that they wouldn’t offer anything more than $100,000 on the Australian show. And so, when I saw $150,000… I thought “Ah, they want me to win!”

SH: Yeah, yeah. Good!

DP: I mean, they weren’t handing it to me, but they were saying, “We want you to get this.”

SH: Yeah, just quietly…

DP: So, suddenly any cautious thinking went out the window, and I thought, “I have no option. I have to go for four.”

SH: That’s gutsy! How did you train for going on Beat the Chasers?

DP: I’ve got a couple of versions of Trivial Pursuit, so I just read as many boxes of Trivial Pursuit questions as I could, I’d get my wife to ask me 20 questions over dinner. And I learned a lot of popular culture, because I thought that, as I get older, it’s increasingly my weakest area. Ironically, there was a girl on the show just before me, this cute young lawyer, Mara, and she got a question where I knew the answer was Bruno Mars. And she didn’t know it. That was annoying, because I would have liked that question, obviously.

SH: Yes, of course.

DP: I think there might have been one other question I knew the answer to because of my study. But really, I think the study was to give me the confidence and the self-assurance that I’d done as much as I could do in preparation.

SH: Yeah, which is big – confidence is an enormous part of the equation.

DP: Yeah, it really is. And look, the only reason I won was because on the night I pulled it out of somewhere that Nicole Kidman played Chase Meridian in Batman Forever… a movie I never saw!

SH: You’re very good!

DP: But I must have seen it on IMDb; I must have seen a list of the credits. And it just popped into my head. You know, it was just a miracle.

SH: And just like that, you were $150,000 richer! How was the aftermath of that win, compared to the aftermath of your original Sale of the Century win?

DP: Well, I had an expectation that it wouldn’t be as big, because it was only on for one or two nights, but Channel 7 promoted it as a major prime-time event.

SH: It’s very emotive stuff.

DP: And the morning after I’d done the show, I walked out of my place and past a couple, and the guy turned around and said, “Hey, that’s the guy who was on Beat the Chasers!” I thought, “Holy f***! The first person I’ve seen!” But it turned out that he was the only member of the public who’s said that they saw me on the show.

SH: Okay.

DP: I’ve had no recognition from anyone else, apart from people I know.

SH: Yeah. A very different world from 1986.

DP: It is a different world because so many people I know who saw this show, saw it either on catch up or on YouTube. They didn’t watch it when it went to air.

SH: No, not like in 1986, when a million people regularly gathered around to watch TV at seven o’clock each weeknight!

DP: Yeah. The whole context in which people watch shows has lost that intensity. There are advantages in that you don’t have to be at home at the time it’s broadcast; there’s always some way for you to see it.

SH: I’m not sure audiences enjoy watching clever people display their cleverness anymore.

DP: That’s an interesting point. In terms of the way the culture is moving, that idea of admiring people for displaying their talent at knowledge almost seems old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy now. It’s something that’s gradually declined ever since the days of Pick-A-Box. Pick-A-Box clearly celebrated dry, dull people who just happen to know a lot, and if you got someone like Barry Jones, who had a bit of a personality to go along with it, well, that just made it better.

SH: You’re right. There was a time – and I think its heyday was during Sale of the Century – when people would go “Wow, what a brainiac! I admire brainiacs!” And in that movie Quiz Show, which is set back in the ’50s, they admire intellectuals too. It was a different time.

DP: It’s just not mainstream anymore. There is Mastermind, there was The Einstein Factor as well; but their audiences are not the mainstream audience. And let’s face it, free-to-air broadcast TV is hardly even a mainstream audience these days.

SH: Yeah, I think those days are gone. As you say, commercial free-to-air TV is struggling, so they have to appeal to as many people as possible. I guess it’s the equivalent of clickbait, really.

DP: And now they’re always just short-run shows. The latest (Australian) version of The Weakest Link is just 14 episodes, and they’ve programmed it at nine o’clock. That’s not exactly a vote of confidence from the network.

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Next week, in our penultimate instalment, David and I discuss

More TOP contestant tips,

The rigours of becoming a professional TV spokesmodel and of course

The roles of Southern Comfort and valium in pre-performance preparation…

See you next Tuesday!

Welcome to Part XV of my exclusive and wide-ranging interview with quiz show legend David Poltorak. And since the name of this blog is HowToWinGameShows.com, I felt it would be extremely remiss of me not to ask David for his tips on…

Well, on how to win game shows.

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DP: In terms of advice I’d give to any contestant… I was always eager to sort the people who were serious from the people who weren’t. You know, people who say “I’m just here because my wife thought I should give it a go”, or “we need new saucepans” or “I’ll be happy to just get a (consolation prize) board game!” You know those folks are just taking up space.

SH: But that’s good to know! That’s a very useful piece of information in itself. 

DP: Yeah. And I’d always be impressed with people who had bothered to learn that year’s Oscar winners or some recent landmark events… at least they were trying. And the other thing – and I guess you can’t really teach this – but that whole thing about anticipating.

SH: When it comes to anticipation, one thing I put into practice while I was on the show, was to always watch the host’s mouth while he’s asking the questions. Really concentrate on his mouth. And then when you buzz in, he’ll say another two or three words of the question. And then you’ve got one second, two seconds, even three seconds… that’s a heap of time. If you’ve been intently watching the host’s mouth, you can get a feel for where the question might be going next. Then you can finish the question in your mind, and then you’ve got those seconds to access the answer.

DP: Yes.

SH: And that constant pep talk to yourself; to always be saying to yourself “I know the next one. I know the next one”… rather than not getting one and going “Oh yeah, of course I should have known that… Now, where were we?” If you do that, you’re gone. You always have to go “Okay, let that one go. I know the next one. I know the next one.” I think it was Matt Parkinson who said to me, “It’s like someone’s throwing lots of tennis balls at you. And some of them you’ll catch, some of them you won’t… but just let those ones go, don’t give them a second thought. Just focus on the next one that’s coming at you.”

DP: Yeah. It’s true; it is a mind game. And Sale was so different to Millionaire; the skills needed to do well on Sale were so different to those needed for Millionaire. For Sale, you needed to be quick, you needed quick recall, you couldn’t allow yourself to get flustered, you had to have a broad general knowledge. Whereas with Millionaire… apart from broad general knowledge, none of that other stuff comes into play. But your luck is a much bigger factor in Millionaire because you’ve only got 12 questions. But so many smart people on Millionaire would just get done in by the question about last year’s winner of The French Open, for example.

SH: Yeah. Well, that’s your ‘Ask The Audience’ question. I’ve interviewed two WWTBAM Millionaire winners here – Martin Flood and Rob “The Coach” Fulton and there are certain strategies around when to use those lifelines…

DP: Ah, Martin Flood. When I went on Beat the Chasers, the contestants would stand up at the back of the bleachers, and when they were announced, they’d run downstairs onto the set and meet (the host) Andrew (O’Keefe). And when I was there waiting to be introduced, Martin Flood came over. He was coaching one of the contestants.

SH: Martin wasn’t on the show?

DP: I expected him to be on the show; he was asked, but he decided not to do it. But he was coaching this particular person. I don’t know how you coach… but I guess you can lend your experience…

SH: Now, speaking of Beat the Chasers… you went on it 34 years after you first won Sale of the Century! They were looking for lots of former quiz winners to go on the show. And one thing that struck me about that is that you’ve got quite a lot to lose; there’s a lot of pride at stake. I shied away from going back on Temptation a second time, and since doing Australia’s Brainiest Quizmaster I’ve shied away from anything like that. And yet you had the cojones to go on Beat The Chasers, and of all the former champions who appeared on it, you did the best. So why did you decide to go on it? And what if it didn’t go that well? Can you just talk us through the process?

DP: Well, I got a call from the producer, Andrea Williams, who I’ve known for years, and she said, “Polty, are your quizzing days over?” I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “There’s this new quiz show Beat the Chasers and we’re looking for people who’ve been on other shows… and you’ve jumped to mind.”

And all those things just popped into my head; that chest-tightening feeling. There’s excitement, but at the same time pressure straightaway. But you’ve got to just make it a binary thing; you either say yes or no. If you say no, you may regret it because you see other people get the money, possibly. And part of me thought “Look, I’m nearing the end of my working life…” So there was a greed factor. And I had no confidence I was necessarily going to win, because I know the way these shows are structured these days. At least in Sale‘s day, you could lose but you still left with the board game and a stickpin!

SH: That’s true.

DP: Nowadays on a show, unless you take away the big money, you go home with nothing.

SH: You’re providing really great content for them, and you get nothing in return.

DP: You might get lunch and a bottle of water.

SH: A bottle of water? Yum!

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WILL David accept the challenge of competing on Beat The Chasers?*

WILL he rise to the occasion, and do brilliantly?**

WILL he go home with The Big Money?***

For the answers to all these questions, dear reader, just scroll down to the asterisks below. But for the more detailed answers to all these questions, be sure to join us next Tuesday afternoon, right here at HowToWinGameShows.com!

* Yes.

** Also yes.

*** Again, also yes.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” This quote is usually attributed to John Lennon.

But it also seems to be ringing true for David Poltorak, as his plans of a screenwriting career continue to be interrupted by his role as Sale of the Century question writer and adjudicator…

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DP: Each year, the show’s run would be extended… the numbers were gradually trending down, but they’d pick up occasionally, you know. They’d throw in a special, and they’d go up again, briefly. But we got all the way to the end of 2001.

SH: And during this time, when you’re doing your behind-the-scenes work, was it a full-time job? Was it nine to five?

DP: Oh, absolutely. That was the thing; it so quickly became all-consuming. As I said, I had to write 180 questions a week. I was madly scouring newspapers and magazines for anything contemporary that was happening in the news. But most of the stuff was coming from either dictionaries or Britannica. There were 12 A-Z volumes of Britannica. So, each week, I’d open say Volume One of Britannica. And I’d start at the front, find my first question there. Then I’d go to the back, and working from the back, get my next question there, work my way to the middle. So, I got 24 questions a week from Britannica. I got another 10 from the Guinness Book of World Records. I had another book called Rock and Pop Day by Day, which was just a sort of calendar of musical events, births, deaths and record releases since the 50s. So that was a source of another possibly 10 questions. I had a Halliwell’s Film Guide, I’d get at least five questions from there. At the end of ‘91 – my first year on Sale – I got my first laptop; an Apple black and white laptop. So I’d take that to the studio with me and I’d spend the day in my downtime, looking for questions out of World Book Dictionary, which I found is a very user-friendly dictionary. It was written for the normal person in America. So, the language tended to be very simple. It wasn’t highfalutin, like the Oxford dictionary or even the Macquarie dictionary, which tended to be a little bit verbose in its definitions.

SH: And you were writing 180 questions a week. How many question writers were there?

DP: There was one other guy who was writing the ‘Fast Money’s and the ‘Fame Game’s. Initially, that was Graeme Rickerby, then another former winner on the show, Brian Fitzpatrick.

SH: So just two people writing all the questions for the show?

DP: Yeah. And then, each week, we had to check each other’s questions.

SH: Sure.

DP: So, I’d be on the plane (from Sydney to Melbourne), going through the questions, making notes, and then we’d have a production meeting for a couple of hours for each record day. And then I’d bring up any issues that were there; there might be doubles, there might be badly written questions that needed to be retyped. We had a gang of girls who just used to type cards all day because everything was done on IBM golf balls, nothing was computerized. I mean, the questions were delivered to me by courier, they were printed out down in Melbourne, they came up to me in Sydney by courier, so I was reading question cards on the plane going back down to Melbourne.

SH: There were no other options back then.

DP: Yeah.

SH: When you were in that job, were there moments where you thought, “Ah, I wish I’d known this when I was a contestant”? Is there anything that you-as-a-question-writer would’ve liked to have told you-as-a-contestant?

DP: Well, this is a bit silly, but I remember one bit of flippant advice I used to give people was, if they ask “What European capital city…” just jump in early and say “Paris!”

SH: Okay. And that works?

DP: Well, it worked for me once on a championship, and it is arguably the most famous capital city in Europe, so when in doubt…

SH: Indeed!

DP: On one of the episodes I was on, there were at least four consecutive answers that started with D. And I thought ‘the question writer is writing from a dictionary, but they’re not even shuffling the questions around’!

SH: Right.

DP: It might have been coincidence, but I thought I had a little insight into her process. It’s the pressure of having to churn out so many questions.

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Next week, David reveals his very best tips for aspiring game show contestants, and we’ll find out exactly what tempted him back in front of the cameras for his very successful tilt on last year’s Beat The Chasers!

See you then.

When we left off last week, David had just received a call from the people at Grundy’s (the production company who made Sale of the Century), offering him the job of adjudicator on the show! ==========================

DP: … And I was just really chuffed! I’d never imagined that this was going to happen, I didn’t think I’d get this job! And so they flew me down to Melbourne, where the story was that (host) Tony Barber was about to have a hip replacement. So they were going to record a bunch of extra episodes so they’d have enough to broadcast while Tony was recuperating. They’d be an extra month ahead, and these episodes would all go to air at the start of ‘91. I was watching Fran Powell; she was the show’s current adjudicator. She was the last adjudicator to appear on air, but by this stage she was offscreen. Times had changed, and actually seeing the adjudicator made for dull TV.

At the start of ‘91, I went to Melbourne to do the job when Tony came back. And then three months later, there was a contract dispute or something, and the word went around that Tony Barber was leaving the show. And everybody was just gloom and doom. Everybody just thought “Well, that’s it. Sale‘s done“. Tony was the show, or that’s what everyone thought… and presumably, it was what Tony thought! The show was due to be off anyway for two weeks, for the Pan Pacific Swimming Championships, so the network and Grundy’s basically had two weeks to find a new host.

SH: Wow.

Out with the old… (Tony Barber & Alyce Platt)

DP: They tried all manner of combinations and finally settled on Glenn Ridge and Jo Bailey, who replaced the lovely Alyce Platt, who unfortunately was collateral damage.

… and in with the new. (Glenn Ridge & Jo Bailey)

DP: I mean, you can’t change the host without changing the hostess, can you? Anyway, a lot of us working on the show were in the deepest funk. We thought there’s no way the show can survive with these two. Don’t get me wrong; Glenn Ridge is a lovely guy and an innately smart person, but he conveyed no sense of having any idea what the questions were about, and he also had a lot of difficulties reading big words. 

SH: Really?

DP: Yeah.

SH: And big words or little, as host he needs to read lots of questions really quickly and articulately. And he had no experience doing that? How on earth – 

DP: A lot of practice – a hell of a lot of practice. I mean, there were words we learned very early on we could not put in questions… “Mesopotamia” was a key one. “Which river in Messpo… which river in Meps… I’ll try that again… which river in Mes… I’ll try that again.”

SH: Oh dear.

DP: The record days stretched out… I can remember talking to Pete Smith, the voice man. And he said, “Dave, this is it. You know, it’s over, it’s over.” He just could not see the show lasting the rest of the year. And at that stage, I thought “I’ll do this job for a year, because it’ll be an interesting experience”.

SH: Sure.

DP: Because I really wanted to get stuck into more scriptwriting. So when I started the job as the adjudicator, I was thinking of it as just a short-term thing. But the show kept going, longer than anybody expected it would! Glenn Ridge got better, and we all got better at learning what to give him and what not to give him. He was a very charming, nice guy, and obviously the audience liked him. And as a comparison, in Tony Barber’s day, I only ever saw him speak to contestants when the cameras were on. When the cameras weren’t on, he wasn’t there. He had this knack for disappearing as soon as we weren’t recording, whereas in recording breaks Glenn would go and chat to the contestants, very down-to-earth, unassuming. Was Glenn Ridge the host for your episodes?

SH: Yeah, I went on twice. In 1994 and in ’99. Yes, Glenn made his way over and shook our hands and introduced himself before the show started, which I thought was pretty classy.

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Sale of the Century eventually finished in 2001 after 4,610 episodes, completing an incredible 21-year run! Four years later in 2005, it was rebranded and revived as Temptation, and went on to run for another 555 episodes.

But that, my friends, is another story…

Our discussion last week of whether David was resigned to being pigeonholed as ‘The Quiz Guy’ got me thinking…

===========================

SH: At the time, what other quiz shows were on? Other than Sale of the Century?

DP: I think around that time Channel 10 tried to revive Pick A Box with Mike Walsh as the host.

SH: Oh really?

DP: And I remember going to the audition. And a producer getting us to do what we needed to do for the audition, but also telling us that the network had just axed the show. “So,” he said, “it was most likely that we weren’t going to be used, but we would do the audition anyway…” So that was one show that looked (briefly!) like it might’ve been an opportunity. Tony Barber hosted the local version of Jeopardy!, but it was a very short run. So it really wasn’t until quiz shows morphed into a kind of reality-style concept, which is what Millionaire and Weakest Link and every iteration since has adopted.

SH: So when did they ask you to write questions for Sale of the Century?

DP: Okay, so I won in late ‘86. I travelled in ‘87. I did lots of little jobs. I worked on a couple of TV pilots; I had some friends who pitched a pilot for a quiz show. It was a really terrible concept. It was like Sale of the Century, except the contestants had to wear a silly hat. Because that was their character (!) There’s just this blur of little jobs I did like that… I didn’t need the money, so I was happy to work on various pilot ideas.

But then in 1989, I got a call from the ABC to be the adjudicator and a question writer for a show called The Oz Game, which was hosted by John Derum. It was a six o’clock stripped show, Monday to Friday. And it was three teams with two family members; typically a parent and a child. Most of the questions were about Australiana. The winners got things like Akubra hats and Australian-style stuff that wasn’t very expensive. And when I look back at that, I shudder at my ignorance. I remember we did a celebrity episode; one of the contestants was a woman I vaguely knew by appearance; she played a nurse on a soapie. And one of the questions was “What is the longest bone in the human body?” And my card said “Thighbone”, and she answered “femur”, and I marked her wrong.

SH: Oh.

DP: She arked up, and I was mortified. I was so glad I got to basically serve an apprenticeship in that role. But that was a major gaffe that stuck in my mind. It made me realize that there was a lot – a hell of a lot – I didn’t know. And I guess that’s the frustrating thing about all this work I’ve done on various shows over the years…. The more I do know, you’re always just expanding the boundary of your own ignorance. That area- outside-the-things-you-know just seems to get bigger. I mean, on one hand, yes, I know capitals and stuff; I’ve got most of that under my belt. But there’s still so much sport. Sport is just never-ending. Sport is just continually expanding in its range and breadth and depth and it’s just so hard to keep up. And I think even say 40 years ago, there was just far less of everything. If you were a Learned Man back in the Renaissance, then you could have pretty well had a grasp of everything.

SH: Right. Because there was only so much that you could know.

DP: Yeah. So now it’s just not getting easier. So anyway, so I did that job on The Oz Game for three months. I then worked on another ABC show; the local version of University Challenge. And that was another great testament to ignorance on the part not just of myself, but of everybody involved. And we wrote questions and the production team went round to various universities to get students to go on the show. But when we recorded the episodes there was so much dead air. We’d overestimated – to a tragic degree – the knowledge level of the contestants.

SH: Oh dear.

DP: So, it was horrible.

SH: Lots of embarrassing silences where everyone stared blankly at each other?

DP: Yeah. We’d gone way too academic.

SH: For university students?

DP: They really didn’t know much. And there’d been no kind of instruction. Nobody’d had the wit to plan ahead and think, “Well, just how smart are these people going to be?” The assumption had been that they’d be like the UK contestants. But the UK is obviously drawing from such a bigger pool that they can have a lot of brilliant people. And we didn’t. It just wasn’t good television. That was also in 1989, I think. And at the end of ‘90, my sister rang me, and said “David, do you know your Sale of the Century World Record has been beaten?” This was news to me, but my sister happened to know someone who knew someone who knew this contestant Kate Buckingham who had just beaten my record in terms of dollar amount, so she replaced me in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Detail of David’s entry in the ‘Guinness Book of World Records’.

And that same day, I got a call from (Sale of the Century production company) Grundy’s. And I thought “Oh, this is nice – they’re going to give me the heads up about my record before it goes to air.” But it was nothing to do with that. They were offering me the job of adjudicator!

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Next week, we’ll get all the juicy behind-the-scenes details of David’s new role, as he gives us an insider’s perspective on the sometimes surprisingly rocky road of ‘Australia’s Richest Quiz’… 

“No explanation necessary.” (Photo: supplied.)

After hearing about all the excitement of David’s incredible win ($132,200 in prizes and a cool $244,000 in cash – in 1986!), my next question was an obvious one…

============================

SH: What did you do with your winnings? I can tell you about my experience, and what I got wrong… (It’s actually point #6, right HERE.) How about you?

DP: Well, I gave my long-term girlfriend (who I’d had throughout my 20s) about $5,000. And she bought a secondhand car. She was the only person I gave cash to. My mother was living quite comfortably with her second husband. And I think I gave her some leather goods. I gave my father a telescope.

SH: I got a telescope. Love telescopes!

DP: I wouldn’t have known how to have a discussion with anybody in my family about what would be appropriate to give them, to make them feel good; I wouldn’t have known where to start. You know, I remember my mother saying, “Look I’m just very happy that you’ve won and that this all worked.” She was sort of an unemotional person. But she was also very rational. And she didn’t want anything. I gave her a briefcase and some luggage, and she was very grateful for that. She was just happy to have the story, as much as anything.

My father subsequently moved to Tasmania with his second wife, but she died shortly after they moved there. And at the wake at my father’s house after her funeral, he was showing everyone the magazine cover from Express.

(This one).

SH: “My son! I’m proud of him”?

DP: I’m watching this and thinking ‘this just doesn’t compute’. A friend of mine put me onto an accountant, and he put me on to a stockbroker – a very sensible guy – and I basically left it up to him to decide where to put my money. I ended up buying a lot of debentures, and put money into the stock market, which was the start of my portfolio. I bought a unit in Woollahra the next year. I went on the trip I won, with my girlfriend at the time. That was the first-class trip to India. But we went business-class, so we could go on to England afterwards. We broke up in England, and I went on to Europe and I came home three months later. So, I was very sensible with the money. I wasn’t working, I was just living off interest; interest rates were really high. So, the term deposits were basically funding my living.

“My cash jackpot cheque, back when $244,000 was worth something!” (Photo: supplied.)

SH: You’re in your early 30s at this stage?

DP: Yeah.

SH: Not long after this, you went back to Sale the Century for your first ‘Champion of Champions’ tournament. How soon after your big win was that?

DP: I think it was fairly early; maybe early ‘87. And I shouldn’t have done it. Because I just wasn’t in the frame of mind. I didn’t study enough, and I just didn’t enjoy it.

Australian team at the 1987 ‘Worlds’: L – R Cary Young, me, co-host Alyce Platt, Geoff Saunders, host Tony Barber, David Bock, Virginia Noel.

SH: Why’s that?

DP: The ‘fame’ aspect of being on the show… I was very ambivalent about. I liked some aspects of it, but I often felt very uncomfortable. I’d lose my bearings with people, in terms of not knowing whether people knew me because they knew me or knew me because they’d seen me on TV. And I found that a really creepy phenomenon. I was surprised by how many people knew me from TV.

SH: Yeah, it was a big-rating show.

DP: A big-rating show. And it was like anywhere I went; someone was bound to talk about it. And if they didn’t talk about it, I didn’t know whether they were just not mentioning it to be polite. So, I thought ‘Wow, I can see the value in anonymity’… But it was nice when people would come up and say, “Hey, I saw you on TV!” It was great. I mean, that was terrific. But often people would say hi, and sometimes afterwards I’d find out it was someone I actually knew! (And I was thinking, that they’d just seen me on TV…) I was offending people left, right and centre!

But I still thought of myself not as a ‘quiz person’; I still had ambitions as a writer and I didn’t want to become just totally associated with quizzes.

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And yet, David’s subsequent career would prove to have a significantly quiz-centric vibe, starting with several appearances on various Sale of the Century ‘Champion of Champions’ tournaments. This is where he’d be going up against the best of the best, and next week, we chat about all the highs – and lows – of that level of intense competition.

Until then, then!  

After his amazing Sale of the Century win, David made arrangements to watch his last episode with some friends at a pub in Taylor Square, and it turned into quite the occasion! He had, however, neglected to invite his parents….

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SH: They were living in Sydney? They could have gone?

DP: Well, they were divorced. They could have gone, but they just weren’t pub people. And I’d never done anything with them socially. My father at that stage had a second wife who was basically a Polish mail-order bride who I did not get on with. I mean, the big drama in my life with my father – because I was raised by my father – was leaving home. When I left home, my father was shattered. I left home in 1974 when my father returned to Poland, for his first trip back since coming here in 1950. And I did it then because I feared for my life if I tried to leave while he was here, because he had threatened to kill me if I tried to leave home.

SH: Really?

DP: Yeah, bit of backstory: my dad was a single father, raised my two sisters and I from when we were quite young, no mean feat back then. He was loving and a good provider but he had a violent temper and was very controlling. And when he came home in 1974, and found out I wasn’t there, and that I’d dropped out of uni at the same time… well, it was traumatic for him as well as for me. I remember the first time I saw him after this all happened – he just suddenly seemed much older. It was like my leaving home just knocked the stuffing out of him. And he was bitter and angry. He burned everything of mine that was at home. I had lots of books and all my schoolwork, my university work, you know, model aeroplanes. I had this vision of him making a bonfire and just burning everything. It was kind of like, I was gone.

SH: Jeez.

DP: It was all very sad. We had a very troubled relationship. And so, when the show went to air, I went to my father’s place one night to watch an episode, and I went to my mother’s place one night to watch an episode. And I think I told him at that stage that I was going to watch the last episode in a pub with some friends. And that’s all it was; it wasn’t like some big event. And everybody seemed fine about that. But, you know, I was thoughtless with my father. When I went around to his place, I didn’t even take anything to drink. I mean, he wasn’t a drinker, but I should have taken a bottle of champagne. And I didn’t. And then when I got there, his wife had made a banquet! Like a celebratory banquet…

SH: Just for you.

DP: Just for the fact that I was coming to watch the show with them. And it was like, “Oh, f***.” I didn’t realize what impact this was going to have on them. And I learnt later they were really hurt that I hadn’t bought a bottle of champagne. But I just thought I was going over there for chops!

SH: Right.

DP: And then after the win, I was being rung up by radio stations. The morning after my winning show went to air, I was woken by Alan Jones ringing me! (I hardly got a word in, though; it was just Alan Jones going on about how I demonstrated what you could do if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, blah, blah, blah…)

SH: While we’re on the subject of publicity after your big win… I also found this magazine cover, from a magazine called Express!

SH: You’re the “star of the century,” apparently! Can you talk us through this?

DP: Well, that was a little arts magazine that the wife of some wealthy businessman had poured money into. And they said, “We’d like to do a story on you.” I said, “Fine, great. You know, let’s, let’s do it.” But this was another source of tension; my new girlfriend was really miffed that they wouldn’t put her on the cover with me. She was very attractive, well I thought so. But they chose this model. And she was just some Norwegian woman who was very dour and hardly spoke any English… or at least she didn’t speak any English to me! But once the camera was on, she just suddenly came alive. It was like, wow, she was made to be photographed.

SH: Yeah.

DP: So, the little bits of publicity that I had, like that magazine cover and newspaper articles, all fed back into the idea in my father’s mind that the fame was going to my head.

“First page of an article I wrote for ‘Good Weekend’, shortly after my win.” (Photo: supplied).

“From a ‘Woman’s Day’ article on quiz show winners.” (Photo: supplied).

SH: Right.

DP: He went from being elated for my win to being depressed about it. It was very odd.

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There’s no doubt that a big win like this is life-changing; not just for the person who wins it, but for their family, too. It’s a fraught and delicate time, mixing family, money and fame… and David and I explore this in a bit more detail as our discussion continues in next week’s instalment.

Until then, then! 

“This is from a local Eastern suburbs newspaper after my big win.” (Photo: supplied.)

It’s November 1986, and David Poltorak has just set a Guinness World Record, by winning $376,200 worth of cash and prizes on Sale of The Century. Some friends were there to witness his incredible victory, and one of them suggested he book the plush Robert Menzies Suite at Melbourne’s 5-star Windsor Hotel that night…

============================================================== SH: The Robert Menzies Suite?!

DP: Yeah. But he wasn’t in.

SH: Haha!

DP: And we had this wild party that night, with everything being put on other people’s credit cards. (I made good when I got the money). But it felt like money suddenly didn’t matter anymore, which of course is easy to say when you’ve got more than you need. I called my parents to let them know. And they were just overwhelmed and stunned at the news. My father, in typical fashion, thought I was calling to tell him that someone had died.

SH: Okay. No, it was much better news than that! Did you have a partner at the time, someone who you could share all this with?

DP: I’d been single for ’86, for most of that year. I’d broken up with a girlfriend the year before that. And I’d had a long-term girlfriend before that. So, I was sort of footloose and fancy-free.

SH: Cool. And so then you’re in limbo because it’s about two weeks between the recording of the show and the show going to air, isn’t it?

DP: It was a month.

SH: Wow. And you’re sworn to secrecy, so how did you handle that limbo period of a month?

DP: Well, they said ‘look, you’ve got media connections; just make sure it doesn’t get into the media. You can tell your friends and family, but just don’t broadcast it beyond that’. But I remember going into my local cafe the next day, and everybody suddenly giving me a rousing round of applause! This was like, eight or nine o’clock the next morning. The word was well and truly out!

SH: Haha! And obviously, you don’t get the cash until the show goes to air. So, in that month, did you go back to work? Did you go window shopping? Did you fantasize about all the stuff you’re going to buy?

DP: Yes, I needed to borrow money from friends for that period because I didn’t feel like doing any actual work. My head was just not in that space; my feet were off the ground! So, I borrowed some money but I assured everybody I was good for it. My big concern was – I just thought ‘I hope Channel Nine doesn’t burn down!’

SH: Yep.

DP: Because if the show doesn’t go to air, you don’t get your winnings. But in that month, the suppliers of all the prizes I won along the way started delivering them. My unit became crammed with boxes of stuff. And one of my prizes, for instance, was Nikon camera gear. Four cameras, including an underwater camera, tripod, slide projector lenses… and there was a coffee machine, I won a luxury watch from the gift shop, I got a lounge suite, which was great. And the cars! I had to make decisions about the cars. I live in King’s Cross (a high density, urban part of Sydney) and I had two cars on the street that I just didn’t need. And I rang my father and said, “Dad, I’ve got a car which I don’t need. Would you like a Camira? And he said “What do I need with another car? I’ve already got my car. Thanks anyway.” So, I advertised it. And contractually, you weren’t allowed to say that you’d won it on a particular show; the public can’t know that you’re offloading something you won on Sale of the Century. So I sold it privately for 10 grand, although it was probably worth 18 or 20 at that stage. Then the next week, I get a call from my dad; “Ah, son, you know that car you offered me? Mine has just been stolen.”

SH: Oh no!

DP: One of the painful things about it was my father’s response in the months after my win. Initially, he was elated. Because I was no longer (his favourite catchphrase) “My son the bum”. Delightful, thank you, dad. But in the days after I won, my dad’s calling me; “Son, this is incredible, I can’t sleep!”

SH: Oh, that’s nice.

DP: Yeah, he was so excited by it all. But then I think the reality set in that it didn’t actually mean anything to him, you know, and he then went the polar opposite and became really embittered. And very, very negative.

SH: Why? Did he think that “you hadn’t worked hard for it”? Or that “you hadn’t earned it,” somehow?

DP: Well, I think he felt that my life had changed. And, although we never sat down to discuss it, I think he felt the difference it made to me would somehow make a difference to him.

SH: Okay.

DP: I was a university dropout. So I had been a disappointment. And I think the fact that I was on TV kind of turned his head a bit. You know, it was…

SH: A big deal.

DP: I did some silly things. I mean, I had a party in a pub for the last episode.

SH: Is that Deborah Conway in the background?

DP: Deborah Conway, Martin Armiger next to her, and out of shot the Japanese pop band Sandii & the Sunsetz, who happened to be in town. I’m wearing the clothes I wore on the final episode. That’s at a pub at Taylor Square. A friend had said “You should have a party in a pub so we can watch it on the big screen.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” So, this friend organized it all. And I really didn’t have any concept of how big it would be. I thought I’ll just have a bunch of friends. It just did not occur to me to invite my parents….

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… which I’m sure you’ll agree is understandable…

but next week, we’ll see the consequences of that decision.

(Spoiler alert: they may not turn out to be entirely 100% positive.)

When we left off last time, David had won 4 consecutive games and flown home to Sydney, to await the next Sale of The Century recording session, when he’d get his chance to return and attempt to go all the way. In this way, David’s run on Sale of the Century paralleled exactly my run on Temptation (the Sale of the Century reboot).

I, too, won 4 consecutive shows when I got on.

I, too, flew home to Sydney to await the continuation of my run. For me, though, the gap between recording sessions was an agonising two weeks, not one, and I’ve discussed all the suspense-is-killing me aspects of that period elsewhere on this blog. I was curious whether David took the same approach to this “downtime” (ha!) as I did…

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SH: So in the week between your two records, did you keep up with your training? Did you watch the show going to air each night, and still do your score sheet? And

did you do any additional research or study during that time?

DP: I don’t know that I would have continued with the scoring, I certainly would have watched the shows. And I certainly would have kept reading. I mean, all I was reading was a one-volume encyclopedia, and The Macquarie Atlas. My aim was just to remind myself of stuff that I had known once, and probably forgotten. I wasn’t expecting to learn much new, because I used to know all the capitals and things like that. I just had to get them closer to the surface of my brain, (if that’s where the memory sits). It was revision as much as anything.

SH: And so in your second record, you had three episodes to win, in order to go all the way. Can you just talk us through those three episodes and how you kept the energy up, and the attack level up? Because the pressure gets higher as the stakes get higher.

DP: Well, for me, the pressure didn’t build; I felt more relaxed, the closer I got to the end.

SH: That’s interesting.

DP: I didn’t actually feel pressured, because after that second episode… I, perhaps in ignorance, just felt that I wasn’t going to be given really tough opponents. And I didn’t necessarily think in terms of ‘Oh, they want me to win,’ I just looked around and made judgments about the people I saw as the contestants that week. And I thought, ‘Well, I could be wrong, but they don’t look that smart, or threatening. They don’t have that fierce vibe about them that tells me I should be worried.’

I just kept up my strategy, if you can call it, that of buying as much as I could. I guess I wanted to be liked by the audience. And I wanted to be the person who bought as much as they could along the way. I can’t remember what my scores were on my fifth and sixth episodes, but certainly for number seven, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m not buying now, I’m just going for a big score; I want to see how much I can get.’ It was purely for my own satisfaction.

SH: That’s an amazing attitude to have when there’s so much on the line. You said yourself, that the motivation for going on this was the money. So, for you not to let that get in your way is quite an incredible thing. You did set some records on that final night; the highest number of questions answered correctly in one episode (35 out of 55), the highest winning score ($200), the most questions answered correctly in the Fast Money round (16).

DP: AND the other record from that night is, that nobody on that show got a question wrong.

SH: Really?

DP: I mean, I got 200. But I think the person that came second got 45, which could often be a winning score.

SH: You won a grand total of $376,200, including $244,000 in cash, and $132,200 in prizes, which was the World Record at the time. Can you describe that moment when you had won, and it was all starting to sink in?

DP: Well, I had some friends in the audience who were some Melbourne locals and one actor from Sydney who was down. She was in The Flying Doctors; Lenore Smith. I don’t know if you remember her.

SH: Yeah. She’s lovely.

DP: Lovely woman. And (Sale‘s host) Tony (Barber) pointed out the fact that Lenore was there because The Flying Doctors was a Channel Nine show, so there was a nice bit of cross-promotion there. And I was aware that when people won, they would often take a moment to thank Grundy’s and the people on the show for making it all possible. But I just forgot all about it! It just wasn’t even on my radar; I was just stunned. Stunned. But what I felt most profoundly was a huge sense of relief. Yeah. Just enormous relief. I just felt this weight had just suddenly lifted off me. I was walking through the set and the streamers are still everywhere and everyone around me was applauding and slapping me on the shoulder and shaking my hand and everywhere I looked, people were just beaming at me. That was just a wonderful sensation. And I remember at the end of the show, Tony said, “Well, David, the drinks are on you tonight!” And I thought ‘Great, I’m going to go out for a drink with Tony Barber!’ So, when the show was over, before I headed back to the office to sign all the forms, I said to the contestant coordinator “Where’s Tony?” She said, “Oh, he’s gone. Why?” I said, “We’re meant to be going for a drink,” because I just had this idea that Tony’s going to be toasting me in a pub!

“From memory, this was taken at some big lunch at the TV station after my win.” But obviously without Tony Barber. (Photo: supplied.)

But I soon realized – and certainly, once I began working in that area – that it’s all just for show. Once the cameras are off, nothing exists. So anyway, my friends and I went back to my dressing room and drank champagne – a nice bottle of Moet – out of plastic cups. After that, it was all out of my hands. The people I was with wanted to celebrate. And I had no money on me! But we went to a bar somewhere and then someone had the bright idea that I should book a suite at the Windsor, which I did. I think it was The Robert Menzies Suite.

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Oooh, fancy! Join us next week, when the corks keep popping and the celebrations just go on and on and on….