“I can audition for 17 hours a day!”: How Emilian became Europe’s greatest game show winner of all time | Game offers

forBeing named TV trivia quiz champion is a funny kind of fame, because random strangers want to quiz you on all sorts of trivia. “Sometimes, I’ll be walking down the street, the car will slow down, the window will roll down, and someone will shout, ‘Capital of Brunei?'” says Emilien, a 22-year-old history student who this summer became not only the most successful French game show contestant of all time, but also the oldest game show winner in European history and the world record holder for the most consecutive individual appearances on a TV game show.

And everyone, of course, wants to know how he did it.

Emilien, known only by his first name, joined France’s popular general knowledge quiz show, Les Douze Coups de Midi (The Twelve Backstrokes) in September 2023 – wearing weird socks for good luck – with only one goal: to make it to the next round.

“What did American aeronautical engineer Edward Murphy name him?” was his first question. “Murphy’s Law,” he replied, explaining that toast inevitably lands on the buttered side. The show’s format means that each day’s winner can come back the next day to compete again. Emilian kept winning – on topics ranging from 16th-century painting to French nuclear power plants, figure skating partnerships to Greek mythology, French rap music to cocktail recipes. No other contestant was able to beat him. He came back day after day making 647 consecutive appearances over nearly two years.

His career ended in July after 21 months – in a 60-second round, he landed on questions including “Which Breton football club will be promoted to Ligue 1 next season?” But by then he was a household name. It boosted audience ratings to over 7 million and sparked a wave of interest in general knowledge among young people. His daily appearances have become a rare force for stability in a country in political crisis: While he was on the program, France burned with four prime ministers.

We met in his modest, sparsely furnished apartment on an unassuming street on the outskirts of Toulouse. He was studying for a history degree here and had to take a pause due to a grueling game show filming schedule. Only a very shiny new toaster on the kitchen counter, which clearly looks like a trophy, indicates his fame. You’d never guess he walked away with a massive cardboard check for more than €2.5m (£2.2m) – a replenishment of almost two years’ worth of prizes that made him France’s first quiz show millionaire.

When he first appeared on the show he was 20 years old and had passed his driving test in a borrowed car less than two weeks earlier. Within a week, he won a Ford Fiesta. But by the time he finished his run, his knowledge of geography, history and Eurovision Song Contest winners had won him a total of 23 cars, not to mention dozens of vacuum cleaners, food baskets, waffle makers, televisions, musical instruments, gaming consoles and board games (plus a skydive and a trip to Lapland). “I had to rent a truck to collect the trophies from the studio and store them all,” he says. He also won 40 kilograms of candy, which he donated to a school. He has sold or given away many trophies.

“Now if I’m in the supermarket, I don’t have to worry about paying an extra 50 cents for a branded product, which is something I’ve never done before,” says Emilian. Otherwise, he continues to live in his usual frugal way.

“It was never about the awards,” he says. “The main goal was always to answer the questions. That’s what I like. It’s really about the passion for testing.”

He says that only the pure joy of testing could have gotten him this far.

Emilian grew up in a small village in the Vendée in western France. His mother was a health aide and his stepfather was a construction worker. He was constantly asking questions as a child – on the quiz show, the presenter called him a “walking encyclopedia”.

In his living room, there are not stacks of huge reference books, just diaries by the French singer Barbara, and he is currently halfway through. Instead, he now works by compiling an extraordinary Google Doc of facts that he has refined, tested, and updated largely through online general knowledge quizzes. “I can sit and test for 16 to 17 hours a day without doing anything else,” he says. But no less important is his membership in Toulouse’s Quiz Club meetings, where he competes and poses questions in a city hall room — largely with pensioners, but the membership is getting younger as trivia quizzes gain popularity in France.

“I just love learning,” he says. As a child, he leafed through dozens of books about world records and interesting facts. “I knew it by heart, and that’s how it all started.” When he was asked on the show to name the busiest airport in the world, he knew it was Atlanta because he had read it in a world record book when he was 10 years old. He had been watching The Twelve Strokes of Noon with his grandparents since he was seven years old, and soon began taking notes. It was his grandmother, Yvonne, a retired babysitter, who encouraged him to keep auditioning for the show – he first tried it when he was 18, but was deemed too shy. When he took part in the show, Yvonne came to Paris for some filming, or appeared via video link to encourage him, and she is also now regularly recognized on the street.

During the Covid pandemic, Emilian’s questions have risen to a higher level. He was in his final year at school and spent most of the lockdown in his bedroom. “I started watching and rewatching TV quiz shows that were in reruns on a frequent basis,” he says. “I loved it. I noticed that sometimes the same questions would come up again and I would memorize the answer. I thought if I kept watching, I would get more answers and it was a snowball effect. I really got into the addictive side of it at that point.”

He believes he watched and commented on so many quiz shows that he must have gone through hundreds of thousands of questions, jotting down the answers in one-word memory prompts in his Google Doc that is now about 180 pages long. He can sit for hours reviewing and testing his memory.

The things he chooses to write down are often related to topics that come up frequently. “If the question is ‘What is a Finnish classical composer…’ There is only one Finnish classical composer who appears in the world of competitions: Jean Sibelius. So I noticed him a few years ago and he shows up quite often and now I don’t need to look at my notes.”

What about football questions? I ask you, do you watch sports channels? He looks surprised. “I’m not learning the composition of teams, for example PSG, which fans might be interested in. I’m learning older information that football fans don’t necessarily have or care about.” These include intricacies and statistics of the history of the World Cup and the Ballon d’Or.

But review papers will only get you so far – especially when TV general knowledge quiz shows cover a wide range of questions, from medieval kings to winners of France’s Drag Race. Emilian believes that there is no such thing as a hierarchy of better or worse trivia – Beethoven and Pokémon are on equal footing when the question timer starts. Because of this wide range of knowledge, he has another very simple but very satisfying skill: “listening.”

If you listen very carefully when you talk to someone about anything, you’ll emerge with facts that you can write down, he says, which makes life so much fun, and conversations so enriching. This was especially true when he had to review contemporary music – listening carefully into every conversation where someone might mention a playlist proved more effective. “It’s simple,” he says. “In an everyday conversation with anyone about anything at all, the discussion might turn into: ‘Oh, didn’t you know that?’ And I’ll go ahead and write it down. A fact might come up that interests me and I’ll pull out my phone and say, ‘Wait a minute, I’ll write that down.’ There are a lot of interesting facts all around us.”

The secret to his success is ultimate attention. “I realized that when you pay close attention to new things, even to new words you skipped when reading a book, it’s like making new discoveries for the first time. Curiosity is the starting point for everything in life. I’ve always loved learning things and I believe curiosity is the foundation for anyone interested in tests.”

This ability to listen closely and focus sometimes made him seem like he had supernatural powers on screen. At one point, the announcer started by asking, “On which sea…” and Emilian immediately interrupted: “The Sea of ​​Tranquility.” It was the correct answer (the rest of the question was about the Apollo 11 landing) and there was awe on set. How was this possible? “In general, when someone asks, ‘in’ which sea, rather than ‘in’ which sea, the answer is a sea on the moon,” he adds. “So in terms of probability, it was most likely to be the case and in a split second I decided to give it a try.”

Filming the competition show was intense. It was compressed into several week-long filming sessions of five to six consecutive episodes per day, with the contestants staying in a hotel near the studio outside Paris. Between filming sessions, Emilian would often take a break for more than a month, returning to Toulouse to review at home every day for 16-17 hours.

“You can shoot 75 episodes in three weeks,” he says. “I like to compare it to an exam… Filming a test program is like taking two or three tests a day.”

To combat the stress (“which peaked before she continued speaking and continued throughout the episode”), sleep was his rule. “I need 10 to 11 hours a night,” he says. Once, after a train delay, he arrived at his hotel at 2 a.m. the night before the shooting, with only five hours of sleep. His mind wandered for a split second while asking about the French city of Albertville in Savoie, which meant he missed an important part of the question. He got the guess right but it was exhausting.

There were rituals during filming, and little superstitions to try to help him get through it. “I would always have a fruit compote before every episode. If I didn’t have time to do that, I would feel completely unsettled.” He always entered the set through the same door and put his water bottle in the same place.

Was he eating special food for his mind? He looks puzzled. “Honestly, I would be the last person to give advice on nutrition… I didn’t drink enough water, I would eat a burger at night and a sandwich during the day, and that was it.”

The question now is what to do with all these facts after presenting the questions? Do they still bring joy? Emilian is adamant that they do it. The key is to transfer certain topics from the Google Doc to real life. “I knew nothing about botany when I started doing tests,” he says. “And I have acquired extensive theoretical knowledge. If you give me the name of a plant, I can tell you which family it belongs to. But although I can classify carnations, I have never actually been able to identify carnations in real life. So now I began to pay more attention to trees and flowers, and one day I recognized a strelitzia in the garden and I was very happy. It doesn’t take much to make me happy, but there you are.”

His cultural tips also come from his knowledge of testing. It’s probably inevitable that testers will know a lot of movies they haven’t actually seen. He decided to watch Louis Malle’s 1950s French masterpiece Raised to the Scaffold because it often raised questions. He loved her. Likewise, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is now my favorite book, having been much-recommended and recommended by many other scholars.

He is now taking a year off before resuming his studies in history, participating in online trivia meetups with the influential French trivia and gaming broadcaster, Étoiles, and checking whether he could have a future as a quiz taker or quiz presenter.

He still goes to his regular meetings at the competition club in Toulouse. I wonder how others feel about your stardom? He looks surprised. “Nothing changes just because you’re on TV,” he says. Others took part in TV quiz shows as well, and no one was bothered at all. “We’re all there to test, share questions, learn things, have a good time and that’s about it.”

He’s still curious, still adding facts to his Google Doc. While we were packing, Frederic, our photographer talked about a photography project in the Tadrart Rouge mountain range in Algeria. “How do you spell that again?” Emilian asks as we leave.