TONY Topham. I'll never forget that name as long as I live. When I'm old and grey (all right, older and greyer), I might forget where I live, who the prime minister is and why my slippers are on the wrong feet, but I will never forget Tony Topham.

I've never met him and probably never will. For all I know he could be long dead. But I'll never forget him because Tony, good old, lovable old Tony, Tone, the Tonester, helped me to win a million.

While the rest of you were loosening your belts to squeeze in one more Ferrero Rocher and a handful of brazil nuts, I was going head to head with Chris Tarrant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

I'd asked the audience, I'd gone 50/50 and I'd phoned a friend - I won't be phoning him again, he was hopeless - and, at last, I had reached the final hurdle. The fifteenth to be precise. The big one. The million pound, multiple choice question from hell.

Chris put on his most supportive yet serious voice; the kind of voice someone might use if they had to tell you the dustbin lorry had just squished your cat.

"For one million pounds," he said, fingering his fringe nervously, "can you tell me who Eric Clapton replaced in The Yardbirds?"

I have never knowingly listened to a single note The Yardbirds produced and I can't stand Eric Clapton and his everlasting guitar solos (I'm yawning like a hippo just thinking about them), but as soon as the four possible answers appeared on the screen, I knew it was Tony Topham.

I don't know how I knew. To my knowledge the only Topham I had ever come across before was Sir Topham Hat, the Fat Controller in the Thomas The Tank Engine stories, but I knew Tony was my man all the same. Call it a sixth sense, but not in a spooky, "I see dead people" kind of way; call it women's intuition if you must, but his name jumped right off the screen and into my very soul.

The only problem was that I now had to convince the other seven players in my team that I was right. Oh, didn't I mention before that I wasn't actually on the telly programme and that I was in fact sitting in my parents' living room with various drunken relatives (the kids had already been packed off to bed with a lump of coal and a satsuma) playing my dad's new Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? DVD, courtesy of Auntie Dot and her good friend Santa?

After deciding for the sake of our collective sanity to rest our tattered Trivial Pursuit this year, we played a few rounds of Millionaire with the boys going up against the girls, although Grandma Madge had a go at all the questions regardless of gender in between wheezy drags on her fag and enthusiastic glugs of Teachers.

Then my dad made a momentous decision. Let's not piddle about with £2,000 here and £16,000 there, let's join forces and go for the million.

After a shaky start when Cousin Rich (in hindsight, a very appropriate name) almost pressed "B - barber shop" instead of "C - barcarolle", we really got into our stride.

By ignoring Grandma Madge's constant shouts of "go for A, it's always A", we managed to argue, bicker and snarl our way to the last question.

Then came the Mexican stand-off. I knew it was Tony Topham, but Auntie Jen knew it was "C", a double-barrelled, dodgy-sounding name which escapes me. We were both 100 per cent sure of our choice.

It was like High Noon in party hats until Jen came up with an ingenious solution. We would all clap three times and then stick one, two, three or four fingers in the air to denote whether we wanted to go for A, B, C or D.

One smart article - I won't name him, suffice it to say he shares a lot of the same genes as my children - waved five fingers in the air, making the first vote null and void. But the second round of clapping and finger jabbing came down clearly on the side of Tony Topham, 5-3.

So, now I have an eighth of a pretend million to spend in the January sales. I wonder if The Yardbirds have a greatest hits album out?

Updated: 10:02 Monday, January 02, 2006