Meet The Cast of Spending the Jackpot

The Setup: Alice Cash always considered herself lucky. A kind husband. Two lovely children. A cosy house. A three-star Spanish holiday every year. What more could anyone want?

Then her husband Freddie wins £2.3 million—and everything begins to unravel.

Suddenly it’s Rolexes, Porsches and private school interviews. Gone is their annual trip to Casa Lola. In its place: a luxury hotel full of snobs and strangers. As Freddie chases a glitzier future, Alice quietly mourns the life they’ve left behind—and starts giving their money away in secret. But while Freddie tries to ‘upgrade’ their lives, he’s hiding a secret of his own. One that could bankrupt their marriage in more ways than one.

The Setting: Norwich - a fine city...

Meet Alice: 40, going on 25. Wife to Freddie, her childhood sweetheart; proud mother of Ryan and Poppy, part-time secondary English teacher; a very happy woman. Well - she was...

(The Alcántaras) are such a nice family, traditional, like Alice and Freddie, yes, but in that Spanish way that seems to come with guitar music, a sunset behind palm trees and a lot of garlic, rather than the English way, where Freddie phones the garage while Alice loads the washing machine.

Alice knows which corners can be cut so some of the square pegs slide easily into round holes.

'Let me think about it,' Alice says, trying to look as pleased as she would have, had she not recently learned that she was a double millionaire.

Alice stares angrily at the scones in the display cabinet, as if she’s considering grabbing one and hurling it at him. She doesn’t share Freddie’s views on this matter; he knows that. It’s one of the subjects they usually dance around, circling each other before moving away, like an awkward little Austenesque Boulangere, to keep the peace at home. Alice sees the mention of this subject as a very low blow. Freddie quickly realises he’s got mud, or something worse, on his court shoes and changes the record rapidly.

They say parting is such sweet sorrow. Bollocks, thinks Alice.

Alice even wonders how they might, one time, go to an away game? Somewhere not too far away, not Wigan, obviously, but she’s heard Ryan mentioning Luton and Coventry, and Millwall in London. They could be nice places to visit. She might suggest that: a weekend in London and a nice family day out at Millwall…?

Meet Freddie: 40, going on 65. Dissatisfied that his career in the bank has stalled. A lottery win has become an all-consuming obsession.

They say some people have poker faces; they don’t say that about Freddie. Freddie has a snap face, every emotion as obvious as a tabloid headline.

While Freddie can name the Kings and Queens of England in order from Æthelstan through to Charles III and his immediate successors, including William of Villa Park and Harry of Santa Barbara, his private school hadn’t seen fit to equip him with much in the way of foreign language skills.

Freddie’s DIY is always safety first. His modus operandi is clear: why buy a full set of Black+Decker power tools, when you’ve already got some Sellotape and Blu Tack? But he won’t touch electrics – you need an expert; and he’s not keen on plumbing – he had a nasty experience with a stopcock once; and he doesn’t do paint – sets off his hay fever. So, it’s Sellotape and Blu Tack for everything else.

Tasha’s suit was Armani. Or so she’d said – Freddie wouldn’t know an Armani suit from a suit of armour.

Freddie walks with his hands behind his back, nodding approvingly at the furniture, looking like a particularly sweaty royal on a walkabout in a furniture store.

Freddie loathes dress-down Monday. One of Tasha’s innovations, designed, she’d said, to bond them as a team.  He knows they all snigger behind their hands at his supermarket jeans and trainers, his pastel-coloured polos or jumpers. But how do you look cool when you’re fumbling your way around forty? He fears he’d look more ridiculous if he wore the expensive brands – unless he was emerging onto a Greek dockside from a superyacht with a supermodel draped on his arm. Difficult look to pull off on the Unthank Road – the nearest water being the Norfolk Broads. You don’t see many superyachts on Hickling Broad.

Freddie, Alice knows, isn’t thinking C&A; he’s thinking Dolce & Gabbana, Stella McCartney. Although, he isn’t, she quickly concludes; the only Stella Freddie’s in any way familiar with is Artois.

Freddie always cooks when a barbecue is planned. Well, he usually undercooks, and often burns, but he’s there with a spatula and a long fork, prodding sausages or spending ages trying to roll a drumstick that’s prominently displaying that highly unusual culinary colour combination that is Freddie’s barbecue speciality – pink and black.

Freddie was quickly overtaken by all the graduates with their totally irrelevant degrees in archaeology or anthropology, any olyology; it didn't seem to matter.

Meet Ryan: 11. Kind, clever, desperate to impress Freddie.

Ryan is a footballer; he’s been a ballboy for Norwich City, has the shirt: Todd Cantwell, number 14, signed, although the shirt doesn’t fit him anymore (Ryan that is). Plus, they sold him (Todd) to Rangers.

Freddie passes his glass to Ryan. ‘You should sniff it first; the aroma is part of the tasting experience.’

Ryan nods gravely, pokes his nose into the glass and takes a huge, snot-assisted sniff, his eyes scanning the table suspiciously, like he’s checking that this bit isn’t one of Freddie’s jokes. Then he takes a sip. ‘Mmmm. Not bad.’

Meet Poppy: 7. Loves reading. And ordering stuff.

Books in strict alphabetical order by author and then title on her bookshelves? Fair enough. Felt-tip pens in rainbow-coloured order on her desk? Okay. Teddies and dolls in an order that only Poppy knows on her bed? Hmmm… There are others: Milk into the bowl before the cereal. Fish Fingers eaten before the chips, chips before the beans. In fact, she always eats the parts of any meal separately, in sequence – even with breakfast cereal, where she tries, by carefully draining the milk off each spoonful before eating the cereal, then finishing off by spooning all the milk down with a contented (relieved?) smile. Left sock and shoe on before right. Ryan into the car before herself...

Poppy’s teacher this year is Ms Gibson, but you have to say Mzzz. It means you don’t know if she’s married or not, but she isn’t, because Poppy asked her when she told them all what Ms meant. She’s got a boyfriend, Arturo, who’s Spanish and works in the deli on the Unthank Road. Ms Gibson’s first name is Anne, short for Annette, but she doesn’t like Annette. She has a kitten called Bonkers and likes Taylor Swift, reading and chatting with her friends in coffee shops. Alice is confident that Poppy will have her bra-size and National Insurance number by the end of the year.

‘Poppy,’ Alice says, in her best schoolteacher voice. ‘What did you think of the school?’ Alice keeps her face straight, stern, hoping Poppy might read her mind and tell her she thought it was shit. Well, maybe not shit, exactly. That might convince Freddie that he needed to enrol her immediately.

Poppy worships Mzzz Gibson who’s got a cat called Bonkers and a Spanish boyfriend working in the deli on the Unthank Road – just the boyfriend, not the cat.

That's the Cash family. Now all they have to do is work out how to spend 2.3 million pounds. How hard can it be...?

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