In 1961, Viv and Keith Nicholson were just about at rock bottom. On a £7-a-week trainee miner's wage they were bringing up three kids in a tiny terraced home in Castleford, Yorkshire. Just trying to make ends meet was a constant battle.
Then the incredible happened - they won £152,319 on the pools(equivelant of £3 million Today) And life for the Nicholsons became spend, spend, spend all the way. Cars, clothes, booze, holidays - they spent money like it was going out of style.
But things didn't work out the way they do in fairy tales. Before long, Keith had died at the wheel of his Jaguar, and Viv was left with the kids, the luxury home . . . and a succession of husbands who married her for money she no longer had and the lifestyle of bizarre extravagance which had made her a celebrity.
How Viv Nicholson handled that dizzy flight from the bottom to the top and back again is the subject of her outspoken book published in 1977- a story like no other in its crazy mixture of exuberance, despair, triumph and tragedy.