Hitting the jackpot with the miserable lottery winners
THE BIGGER your winnings, the more miserable you’ll be. It’s a painful truth, but a logical one. Imagine scooping the office sweepstake on the Grand National — you might pocket £100, and you’d be thrilled for days.
A hefty win on the bingo would be grand: you could buy a new car. But a jackpot on the football pools is more serious. You’d have to pay the mortgage off — and that’s far too grown-up to be fun.
And suppose you netted the really big prize, the Euromillions lottery: what are you going to buy with £100 million? The only things that cost that much are paintings by Van Gogh and Picasso. But hang that Sunflowers picture on the wall, and your sitting-room will look like a student bedsit. People will simply assume it’s a naff poster.
Britain’s most notorious jackpot winner was Vivian Nicholson, a 25-year-old Yorkshire woman who won the pools in 1961 and became i nfamous overnight when she announced she was going to ‘spend, spend, spend!’
For most people in post-war Britain, barely out of rationing, that sounded like ‘sin, sin, sin!’
Nicholson was bankrupt within a few years. She had burned through the entire win — a not-so-whopping £152,319 (about £3 million in today’s money). The five winners in the second series of BBC1’ s The Syndicate, which returns with a
SCREEN goddess of the week: Sian Phillips, spine-chilling as the evil Roman empress Livia, in BBC4’s re-run of I, Claudius. And I do mean goddess: Livia’s insane ambition is to be declared an immortal deity. And why not? The whole series is TV heaven.
new cast, collected far more than that — a total of £72 million, more than £14 million each — and you just know it’s not going to bring any of them much happiness.
This pacey comedy-drama by Kay Mellor (writer of Fat Friends and Band Of Gold) sketched out the characters in a few vivid lines, giving us reasons to care about what happens to all of them.
There’s single mum Becky, not old enough to look after herself, never mind her baby. She lives with her own mother, Mandy, who handles her abusive husband by slipping sleeping tablets into his beer.
Their friend Rose has a good heart and bad knees, and she’s a motherhen to dope- smoking Alan, who grows marijuana in his loft, and stressed- out Tom, whose wife is desperate for a baby.
They all work in a Leeds hospital, where the sour-faced senior sister used to be a member of the lottery syndicate, too, and expects a cut of the winnings even though she had stopped paying in.
One of the pleasures of ‘what-if?’ dr a mas like this is asking yourself whether you would handle things differently.
Would you pay off the disgruntled former member? One week’s interest on £72 million is about 50 grand, which ought to keep her quiet — but does she deserve it?
Would you go public? The characters are bursting to see their names in the papers. But when Mandy is interviewed on live TV, it all goes wrong within minutes when she lets slip that she wants to leave her husband.
And will you keep watching? I will — I’m hooked.
A century ago, cinema-goers were hooked on the extraordinary short films of F. Percy Smith, a junior clerk at the Board of Education who shot close-up footage of insects. These were the world’s first high-magnification movies.
Using hand- cranked cameras and home-made lamps, Smith filmed houseflies and spiders in microscopic detail.
The public couldn’t believe their eyes, and the pictures caused such a sensation that audiences refused to leave the cinemas, demanding to see the reels again.
BBC4’s boringly titled documentary, Edwardian Insects On Film, ought to have been called The Man Who Taught Bluebottles To Do Circus Tricks. Smith filmed flies balancing minute wooden dumb-bells and beach-balls on their feet; he even dressed up one fly in a nurse’s outfit and filmed it playing with a miniature model of a baby.
The footage, unearthed in the British Film Institute’s vaults, was mind-boggling. I would have loved to see much more of i t, and much less of presenter Charlie Hamilton James and his botched attempts to recreate the shots with vintage equipment.
Smith has been largely forgotten, but he did leave his mark. His pioneering stop-motion films of buds opening into flowers and weeds creeping around plant stems inspired a young David Attenborough to make wildlife films. That’s a legacy we can all celebrate.