Mastermind - Round One - Heat 13

For a couple of reasons Mastermind took me back in time tonight, and I promise I’ll explain why. Not yet, though.

Kicking us off tonight, then, was 2013 semi finalist Richard Chaney. Richard offered us one of my all-time favourite sitcoms, Porridge. I could wax lyrical about the acting of messrs Barker, Beckinsale, Mackay and Wilde, and the writing of Clement and LaFrenais. But I won’t. What I will say is that I was annoyed with myself to score only 10 on this round, one less than Richard. Now, I do know enough about Porridge to say that these were a difficult enough set, although I do think that they might well have asked the name of the series of Ronnie Barker pilots in which the first episode, Prisoner and Escort was broadcast. 

Well, anyway, at this rate it was a good start for a tilt at another 20+ specialist aggregate. My chances, though, were not helped by Sophie Starkey’s round on Peggy Guggenheim. Yes, there were a couple of pieces of low lying fruit in The Titanic and Yoko Ono – now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write – but that was about it for me. Sophie did a lot better than that. However, you really need to get double figures to give yourself a fighting chance in the GK round, and Sophie’s 8 always looked like it was going to leave her too much to do.

In the normal course of events, schoolteacher Eddie Alexander would have had the dubious benefit of support from the Clark sofa, however the circumstances were a little different tonight, as I’ll explain shortly. Nonetheless I was hoping he’d do well on his specialist round on the band Deep Purple. I never saw Deep Purple live, although I did see once Whitesnake, which band had more than its fair share of former Deep Purple members. As with Sophie, Eddie didn’t do at all badly, but just missed double figures with 9.

And so to our final contender, Derek Moody. Seeing Derek took me back 10 years to the 2007 SOBM. Why? Because Derek was runner up in the Grand Final, missing out on a tie break by a single point. I’ve written and spoken more than enough about that particular event, so I’ll say no more, other than that I was really, really , really hoping that Derek would go well. As indeed he did. In my answers to his questions I proved that I know nothing about Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Chronicles. I expected Derek to go close to a perfect round, since I’ve had first hand experience of how well and carefully he prepares his specialist rounds. This wasn’t quite perfect, but it was good enough to give him the joint lead with 11. 

Who would win, then? In terms of experience you’d have to have given it to Derek. Not only was he runner up in my Final, he had been stand-in for the final a couple of years earlier, after just narrowly missing out in his semi final. In 2013, though, Ricard had shown impressive GK form in his first round. Well, we’d come to that. Firstly, though, we had Sophie Starkey’s GK round. And a pretty good GK round it was, and at least gave her the satisfaction of having reached double figures in one of her Mastermind Rounds. Eddie Alexander, well, Eddie had been a point better than Sophie in the Specialist round, now he was a point worse in the GK. He scored 9, to also finish with 18 points. 

This brought us to the main event, as it were. Richard took the chair first, and while he never quite reached escape velocity he certainly maintained a steady momentum throughout his round, to add 13 to his total. Putting this into perspective, it meant that Derek was going to need to score 13 and no passes to force a tie break, or 14 to win outright. That’s a sizeable total, not easily achieved, and certainly enough to put you into the corridor of doubt. 

Not that you’d have known it from Derek’s first couple of answers. In fact, for the first minute or so he was well up with the clock. However, the wrong answers were starting to creep in. From this point onwards, in all honesty it became one of those rounds for Derek. More than once he was asked questions where you could see him narrowing options down to a couple of options, and zigging when he should have zagged – for example with Rodin’s Burghers of Calais instead of zagging with The Thinker. When thinks work out like that there’s nothing you can do. Derek took his score to 21.

At the start of this review I did say that there were two things which made this show a bit of a trip down memory lane. The second, then, was the rather extraordinary chat that John had with winner Richard after announcing the final scores. I can only suggest that for some reason this show was a bit short and required some padding. John probed Richard for his reasons for choosing Porridge. Richard, congratulations on reaching another semi final, and thank you for not providing the plug for the revived series of Porridge– starting immediately after the end of the show over on BBC1 – I have a feeling John may have been angling for just such a plug. All in all it was rather reminiscent of the excruciating inter-round chats we poor contenders had to suffer through in my era of the show – and that’s something we really don’t want to see coming back. 

The Details

Richard Chaney	Porridge	11	0	13	1	24	1
Sophie Starkey	Peggy Guggenheim	8	0	10	1	18	1
Eddie Alexander	Deep Purple	9	0	9	2	18	2
Derek Moody	Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Chronicles	11	0	10	1	21	1