Now this, ladies and gents, was a good
show and a good contest.
John H. does seem to have a bee in
his bonnet over the GK rounds. In the past he’s made observations I’ve
disagreed with in his opening comments, along the lines of the GK round being
the one that the contestants fear, a sweeping generalisation if ever there was
one. Likewise, his assetrtion last night that you cannot prepare for a GK round
is understandable, but wrong. It’s very much a question of timescale, and how
you actually target your revision. Still, let’s not get bogged down in that for
now.
You have to applaud any contender who
manages a perfect round, and that’s exactly what we were served up by our first
contender, Ian Fennell. I wonder how many people applied to answer questions on
the late David Bowie for this season? However many, Ian picked this plum, and
given the opportunity he grabbed it with both hands. From early doors it was
clear that he was going great guns, and I’ll be honest, it looked as if John
could have continued asking him specialist questions for the full half hour and
he wouldn’t have dropped any. That’s great preparation making a great
performance.
Which is an observation we might well
make about Alan Diment’s round on Edvard Munch as well. I turned to Zara, my
middle daughter, who had ignored that the show had started and thus not vacated
the living room, and observed that the answer to the first question would be The Scream. It
was, and so that was my work done for the round. Alan, I noticed, often gave a
little smile as he produced correct answers to his questions, and as you can
tell by his score, there were an awful lot of smiles in the round. Another
brilliant performance.
In any other week Chris Rabbitt’s
round on Postwar British Motorcycles would have left him well in contention by
the time that the half time oranges were being handed out. 11 was a good score
on such a searching round. Me? I managed 2 – the Triumph Bonneville, and also
that Geoff Duke rode for the Norton team. I knew that because a dear friend who
introduced me to quizzing used to manufacture replica Nortons, called Manxman,
in a room in the downstairs of his house. Sadly he passed away a few years ago,
but I couldn’t help thinking of him.
Karen Fountain, then, would have had
every justification had she felt daunted coming to the chair, seeing her
opposition all in such fine fighting form. She too had prepared herself
thoroughly though, and ended with a great score of 13 on the Occupation of
Jersey, 1940-45. This was the only round on which I failed to add to my
aggregate. My best round of last night’s specialists was the Bowie round, where
the first half of the questions were kind enough to allow me to get about half
a dozen. Well done to all of last night’s contenders, since this is the first
time we’ve seen an aggregate over 50 since Daniel’s heat, which I think was
heat 5.
So to the GK. Chris Rabbitt, unlucky
to be a couple of points adrift in 4th, manfully stuck to his task,
and built up a score of 20, and I’m glad he got out of the teens. It was no
more than he deserved, for having put up the show that he did on specialist if for
nothing else. 20, though, was never going to be enough in last night’s heat. So
to Karen. Being realistic, I reckoned that a score of about 25 in total would
be necessary to put the boys into the corridor of doubt, and to be honest,
right up until the last 20 seconds or so it looked like Karen was going to do
it. At this point though the round just refused to go any further, and a string
of questions to which she didn’t know the answer brought her a little short, at 23.
Nonetheless, that’s a performance which falls into the category of giving
Mastermind a good old lash. Well done.
Ian Fennell’s task, while not crystal
clear, was still pretty straightforward. Go like billy-o, put as many points on
the board as possible, and let the devil take the hindmost. Unlike most of the last few
heats there was a realistic chance that last night’s second place might achieve
a repechage score. What Ian produced, then, was not a fantastic score, but it
was what I would call a decent quizzer’s score of 13, and when you put that
together with his specialist score, that gave him a highly useful 27. That
could have been a winning score.
No, alright, it wasn’t, but it did
mean that Alan Diment had to produce a terrific round in order to surpass the
target. Which he proceeded to do, putting on a fine 15 to end with a great
overall score of 29. According to John he only just did it. Cobblers. With no
disrespect intended to Ian, two clear points represents daylight between first
and second. That, sir, is one of the best performances we’ve seen for quite
some time in this series, and if you reproduce that form in the semis, then you
could go a very long way.
Well done and thank you to all of last
night’s contenders. Great show.
The Details
Ian Fennell
|
David Bowie
|
14
|
0
|
13
|
1
|
27
|
1
|
Alan Diment
|
The Life and Work of Edvard Munch
|
14
|
0
|
15
|
0
|
29
|
0
|
Chris Rabbitt
|
Postwar British Motorcycles
|
11
|
1
|
9
|
3
|
20
|
3
|
Karen Fountain
|
The German Occupation of Jersey 1940 -
45
|
13
|
2
|
10
|
3
|
23
|
3
|