KEY POINTS:
Let me tell you one thing about Kristin Castle: what you see is what you get. She embraces life in just the same buoyant, excitable way that she embraced the chance to win $1 million on TV.
But when you have known trouble and injury, when you have
come as close to death as she has, then maybe it does give you a greater appreciation of life.
When she was only 16, she was seriously injured in a motorbike accident that claimed the life of one of her close friends. After six weeks in hospital, she checked herself out - to go back to school.
Despite the prospect of years of pain from her injuries, she knew that she had been given a chance at life.
Kristin wanted to help people so she has spent her adult life working first with Women's Refuge, and then as a fundraiser for the Mary Potter Hospice.
And she wanted to experience life - so she got back on her motorbike, went sky-diving and dared to dream of taking the hot seat of New Zealand's richest quiz show.
Quiz shows, of course, are not designed to reward the most deserving. Quiz shows are not even about rewarding the intelligent - though she is very, very smart. Quiz shows are about rewarding the entertainers.
And Kristin entertained. With nearly 700,000 viewers last week, Millionaire was the country's highest-rating quiz show in years. I think New Zealand fell in love with Kristin. But then, I've always liked her: we flatted together for two years in Wellington and became friends.
The gurgling chortle, then the whooping guffaw, and finally the rasping laugh more befitting a garrulous old man.
When she moved into our student flat in Kelburn, she was keen to set up a fundraising scheme she had run in her previous flat. They worked out that they could win $900 a month by beating all the late-night teletrivia quiz games on the 0900 lines.
With the money she was winning, they would buy half a dozen mega-value packs of mince, herbal teas and the Nescafe Classic instant coffee that she lived on.
That all worked - until the 0900 phone bills started piling up at the door. I vetoed the scheme for our flat.
I texted my congratulations after her first show screened, and Kristin phoned me back - perhaps because I work in newspapers and might know how to tame the media beast.
"People seem to think I'm mad," she acknowledged, wryly.
And I can understand how people perceive her that way.
Once, after a flatmate's 21st birthday, the bar manager was so convinced she was drunk that he confiscated her car keys and called the police.
In front of the two constables, Kristin took back her keys, and purposefully drove her car across the road and reparked it. She took the breath-test - and passed. She was not drunk at all; just high on life.
New Zealanders took her to their hearts after they saw behind the veneer of the politicians - the donations, the share holdings, the tape recordings. Then the Tony Veitch allegations took the gloss off the shiny face of TV.
Kiwis may have recognised in Kristin a real authenticity that they had been missing.
