And the dividend forecast is.........

"Don't tell anyone," said my mother in little more than a whisper as she sent us off to Sunday school. "But we may be rich."

By the time (later that day, Monday at the latest) we knew we were not rich at all, we'd told everyone, starting within minutes of that parental plea for discretion.

Dad had won the football pools, or rather he and three people from work had won shares of a full dividend. In a town like ours (Shildon, Co Durham) a pools win was guaranteed to change lives quite dramatically, split four ways or not.

The only trouble was that everyone else, and everyone else's syndicate, seemed to win that Saturday. So many draws had been played out on the football grounds of the nation that his ultimate fortune was four into 32, not four into a million.

This tragic childhood memory came back for some reason while I was watching a French quiz show called Le Mur.

Inevitably, it is an imported idea, probably from America, and it involves one contestant battling against a wall of 100 rivals, arranged in groups according to employment or interests (les Bikers, for example, les Beatles -impersonators, that is - or les Gymnastes).

There is a succession of general knowledge questions, with the correct answer given in each case among three choices. The individual player can climb towards 200,000 euros, eliminating members of the wall as he or she goes along whenever they, responding to the same question, press the wrong button.

I can imagine it would seem ghastly on American or even British TV, but it somehow works, at least for me, in French.

This is partly because its success requires a lot of people to behave inanely with football-style chanting, cheers and boos and one of the things I like about the French is that they never mind making fools of themselves provided they have fun doing so.

Even the fact that Mme Randall rather fancies the presenter, Benjamin Castaldi, grandson of a one-time French golden couple of film Simone Signoret and (adoptively) Yves Montand, fails to put me off. And when a stout ambulancewoman called Catherine won the top prize after a brilliant performance, I was as chuffed as if I'd won it myself.

I realise that even 200,000 euros - especially since, if I understand the rules correctly, half goes to a participating viewer - is not the stuff of serious wealth. Most of us would see it as a pretty tidy sum, however.

But it must have been that sharing element of the game that put me in mind of the day I thought I belonged to a pools-rich family. Dad was sharing his winnings with others, and the total jackpot was in turn being divided among thousands.

Despite this early gambling setback, I became a regular pools punter. It took me not merely years but decades to win my own first dividend on the pools.

In Le Mur fashion, you may guess where I was when I discovered the extent of my windfall:

a) Doorstepping Jeremy Thorpe in north Devon

b) Watching Sunderland Reserves, away

c) In Colditz Castle

Et la bonne réponse - after plenty of drum rolls, gasps, impertinent chanting from the wall - est la réponse C. I had been reporting on an old comrades' reunion and had just finished dictating my carefully constructed story from a phone deep inside the castle.

I'm in there somewhere
Picture: EL ALBERTO

"Never mind your story," barked Richard Savill, a friend sitting in the office back in London and in need of urgent clarification from the organiser of the newsroom pools syndicate. "Was it Vernons or Littlewoods?"

Happily it was Littlewoods, and instead of something like my dad's long-ago £32 being split 19 ways among colleagues (Vernons was cheaper to play, and accordingly meaner with its prizes), we had £5,700 between us - or £300 each.


Spend, Spend, Spend? Not quite. Enough to pay a car repair bill here, a holiday deposit there, and better than a kick in the teeth. But take it from me, it hardly changed our lives.