Mastermind - Round One - Heat 20

I may be wrong, but I believe heat 20 saw the end of the double headers. Shame really, I’ve enjoyed these hour long questionfests. I picked up some points on each of the specialist rounds in heat 20, although the first of these – the Coast to Coast Walk, provided me with my lowest score of just one. – Coast to Coast Walk – St. Bee’s Head to Robin Hood Bay - I thought to myself. Thankfully that was enough to bring an answer to the first question. Contender Ruth Green obviously knows this subject extremely well – she wasn’t far off a perfect round , and her 15 and 1 pass certainly laid down the gauntlet. Game on.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Short for answering on Pop Music of the 1980s. Now, my detailed knowledge of pop music pretty much ended around 1987, but the 10 years or so up to then, that I know a little about. Thankfully the vast majority of these questions were about 80 – 87, and I whacked in my highest SS score of the evening with 12. Ah, Strawberry Switchblade – we won’t see their like again. Phil also scored 12 – although not exactly the same 12 that I managed. A perfectly good SS score, but a deficit of 3 points to make up was certainly food for thought.

Danielle Thom answered questions on the satirical works of William Hogarth. Now, as it happened my great great great great grandfather Philip Dawe was a cartoonist, artist, publisher and engraver who was taught by William Hogarth. Not that you need to know that. What you do need to know is that Danielle managed a good 13 . As for me, I managed 4 – mind you one of these points was scored by answering “Gin Lane” to every question until it proved to be the right answer.

I didn’t expect to score many points on the Life and Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Thankfully there were 4 which were easy enough to give me points , on The Lark Ascending and Scott of the Antarctic to name a couple of them. As for contender David Love, well I venture to say he had done considerably more than just checked out Vaughan Williams’ Wikipedia page ( excellent though that may well be ). David scored a perfect 16 from 16, the finest SS round of the whole evening.

Phil Short returned to the chair. He gave it a lash, but he did struggle a little. It didn’t matter, since he made it through the 20 point barrier into respectability and a total that’s nothing to be ashamed off. In fact his 22 is only 2 points lower than the winning total of the previous heat. Phil was still in the lead by the end of Danielle’s GK round, although this was only on pass countback. Danielle herself didn’t quite manage to reach double figures, but she too managed to finish with 22. Ruth Green started her GK round very well and confidently, as so many contenders do, but became becalmed , and struggled to get any momentum back in her round. Nonetheless she was three points ahead of Phil after the SS rounds, and two points of this lead were still intact after her round. If I’m honest, I felt that we were unlikely to see two shows in a row won with a score of 24, and within a minute of David Love’s round it looked fairly obvious that he was going to beat the score. In fact, I thought that his GK round was easily the best of the night. He scored a good 14, and had some very good answers along the way. I’ve seen faster rounds, but this was good – he never lost his focus throughout the round. This brought the just reward in the form of a fine total of 30. For the record my scores on the GK rounds were , in the order they were asked – 19, 18, 17 and 18.

The Details

Ruth Green	The Coast to Coast Walk	15 - 1	9 - 4	24 – 4
Phil Short	Pop Music of the 1980s	12 - 0	10 - 2	22 – 2
Danielle Thom	Satirical Works of William Hogarth	13 - 1	9 - 4	22 – 5
David Lowe	Life and Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams	16 - 0	14 - 4	30 - 4