Last night, Toronto Jeopardy! champion Mattea Roach, won her 22nd match, bringing her total winnings to more than $680,000 Canadian — an impressive feat, but it’s the story she told during the interview portion of Wednesday’s night episode that is making us O Canada proud.
In 2018, the Halifax native got the chance to sing backup for no other than Rick Astley, the 80s pop star who had a resurgence in popularity thanks to the “Rickrolling” meme that went viral in 2007. And it wouldn’t have happened without a little help from a Toronto-based musical choir.
“So there’s a choir in Toronto very creatively titled, Choir! Choir! Choir! that basically is drop-ins,” Roach told Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings. “So you pay $5 and you go and you sing in, like, the back of a bar somewhere and they invited Rick Astley to come and sing with them and he actually came when he had a tour date in Toronto. So I got to sing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ with Rick Astley.”
Turns out the ‘back of the bar somewhere’ was the back room of Toronto’s Clinton Tavern where Roach and a few hundred others got to sing along.
Formed by Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman in 2011, Choir! Choir Choir! is a Toronto-based group that started as a weekly drop-in singing event. Choir! takes an untraditional approach to their shows: at the door, choristers get a lyric sheet, are taught the vocal arrangement, and a video is recorded. The group gained recognition in 2016 when their rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, performed six days after his death, went viral.
After her win, Roach posted the video, which has received close to three million YouTube views, on Twitter.
Feast upon the footage of me (and a bunch of other lucky Torontonians) singing with Rick Astley as described in tn’s Jeopardy anecdote! I’m the one with blue hair at around 3:35: https://t.co/OFa8Jc0EJo
— Mattea Roach (@mattearoach) May 5, 2022
It wasn’t long before congratulatory tweets started pouring in including one from Choir! Choir! Choir themselves.
“When we get the Toronto crew together we’ll sing the Jeopardy theme song.”
Roach, a 23-year-old tutor has already earned a spot in Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions which will air in the fall. Tonight, she’ll face off against an Arizona mortgage lender, and a middle school teacher from Indiana in the hopes of winning her 23rd game.
