Ellie Milnes and Amira Price, of Moulton, near Newmarket, scoop £10,500 jackpot on BBC’s Pointless

Two long-time friends who have known each other since their days at their village primary school scooped the £10,500 jackpot on Pointless when they reached the final of the popular television quiz show.

Twenty-two-year-old Ellie Milnes and Amira Price, 21, of Moulton, won the top prize on their first appearance on the BBC show, which was televised on Thursday.

They beat three other pairs of contestants and found themselves £10,500 richer having come up with not one but two pointless answers to the final question to name any winner of an individual gold medal in women’s or men’s individual artistic gymnastics in any Olympic Games from 2000 to 2020.

Of the three answers they gave, Aly Raisman and Aliya Mustafina were both pointless while Gabby Douglas scored just one point.

“When it came to choosing the final category we had to go for gymnastics because we didn’t really know anything about the other two,” said Ellie.

“When our first answer went down to one we were hoping we could do it and we did.”

Ellie and Amira are both former pupils of Moulton Primary School and Newmarket Academy.

They both went on to study at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge before heading to the University of York where Ellie studied English and Amira linguistics.

They are currently both working at The Packhorse in Moulton while planning their next career moves.

Ellie, whose father David is the Racing Post’s Newmarket correspondent, said it was while they were studying at York they decided to try and get on the show.

“In our university house we watched it every day and, like everybody, thought we could do that and we rang up to apply,” she said.

“We both had to answer a few questions to test our general knowledge, but they wanted us on straight away and, amazingly, within a week we found ourselves in the green room at Elstree Studios in London, where the show is filmed, with people who had applied to be on months ago.”

The show was actually filmed back in November 2023, so the girls had to keep quiet about how they got on until last week.

They did not get off to the best of starts when they had to match the last word of a pop song with the first word of a classical music piece and Amira’s answer, though correct, scored a high 76.

However, they got through to the head-to-head round where, in a tie break, Ellie’s knowledge of American author and poet Maya Angelou paid dividends.

Their answer, San Francisco, to the question ‘In which city had she become the first black woman to work as a street car conductor’ was right and scored just seven points which took them through to the final.

The friends spent some of their winnings on travelling in Asia – Ellie to Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and Amira to Thailand and Indonesia.

And while Ellie’s coveted Pointless trophy has pride of place on a dresser in her bedroom, Amira gifted hers to her proud grandmother.