Extraordinary items - No mystery to big cash win.

You are a qualified accountant, a former FD, and you suddenly win #125,000 on TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Do you (a) salt it away into a pension fund? (b) invest it wisely in a sensible portfolio? (c) spend half of it on booze and women (and squander the rest)? or (d) pour the lot into a dotcom venture?

If you’re Peter Jenkins, the one-time FD of serviced offices group Regus, whom we interviewed in December 1999, the answer is (d). But it’s not just any old dotcom. Jenkins and his wife Anne, a former president of the Women in Accountancy Group, are the founders of demyst.com, an internet-based professional training business that needed to find a hundred grand to take the project to the next stage of development.

“No matter how good you are the market’s just not interested,” Jenkins found. But the pair of keen pub quizzers hit on the idea of trying to win the necessary capital – and succeeded in the “couples” version of the TV gameshow. The publicity they’ve got has helped, too, as potential backers have since materialised. They may be millionaires yet.