Brothers Russell and Roger are among my closest friends, and our friendship has always been fueled by a mutual love for the well-executed prank. In 1999, when Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? first exploded onto South African television, the stakes for our brand of mischief reached an all-time high.
Both brothers possess prodigious general knowledge, having honed their trivia skills through years of grueling pub quizzes. Russell was the first to take the plunge. He applied for the show and, a month later, received the coveted "screening call." The producers filtered contestants with a numerical logic question—something like, "How many standard bricks would it take to pave a tennis court?" You had to deduce the answer on the spot; the closest estimates won a seat in the studio.
Russell made the cut. We all tuned in to watch him dominate the "Fastest Finger First" round and take the hot seat. He was brilliant, breezing through the levels until a tricky question about the Winter Olympics finally stumped him. He retired with a cool R32,000—not a bad haul for a single night’s work.
Naturally, Roger was itching to follow in his brother’s footsteps. The competitive fire was lit, which provided Russell and me with the perfect opening.
I have a bit of a knack for voices, so I called Roger’s house and adopted my most professional, "Stacey-from-the-production-office" tone.
"Hello, Roger. This is the production team for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? We are currently screening for our next round of contestants. As you know, we require you to logically deduce a numerical answer. The closest contestant to the correct figure will be invited to the studio."
Roger was instantly beside himself with excitement. He was hooked.
"The question for you, Roger, is this: Exactly how many pages are there in total in the complete 32-volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica?"
"Oh... oh dear," Roger stammered. "Let me see... can I confer with my friend here for a moment?"
"You have sixty seconds," I replied frostily.
What followed was pure comedic gold. We could hear them frantically whispering in the background, trying to calculate the average thickness of a volume, the density of the paper, and the likely page count per inch. It was a masterpiece of desperate, high-speed mathematics.
Finally, Roger came back to the phone, sounding breathless but confident. He delivered a number he had practically sweated over—something incredibly specific, like 32,640.
I stayed perfectly in character. I let the silence hang for a long, dramatic beat.
"Thank you, Roger," I said, my voice dripping with official gravity. "Now, for the tie-breaker: How many individual feathers are on a standard, adult South African Ostrich?"
That was the breaking point. There was a beat of stunned silence before Roger started to protest. "Wait... what? Is that even logically deducible? How on earth could I—"
At that moment, Russell and I both lost it. The "production office" collapsed into a fit of hysterical giggles as I dropped the accent. Roger was fuming for a solid minute, his brain still stuck in "Encyclopedia" mode while we roared with laughter at the other end.
He didn't get the R32,000, and he certainly didn't get to the hot seat, but he did eventually see the funny side. It turns out that while he knew everything about the world’s most famous encyclopedia, he’d completely forgotten the first rule of our friendship: Never trust a phone call from Russell and Graeme.
