Mastermind 2019 - The Grand Final

Good morning to all. So, last night we reached the climax of the 2019 season. Firstly, though, it is only right to pay tribute to the late Hamish Cameron. I did not know that Hamish had passed away until a comment left on the blog a few days ago. I believe that Hamish passed away on the 6^th of June. I cannot claim to have known him very well, but was fortunate to meet him when he was the stand in for my final. I believe that Hamish had participated as a contender in more episodes of Mastermind than anyone else, and the tribute paid to him at the end of the show, a true Mastermind, seemed to me to be very sincere and appropriate. Rest in Peace, Hamish.

Let’s have a look at the form shown by each finalist on their route to the final:-

Mark Grant	Keith Douglas	14	0	15	0	29	0
	1951 Festival of Britain	13	0	13	0	26	0
Dave Cowan	Glamorgan CCC	12	0	15	0	27	0
	The Life of Aneurin Bevan	10	0	11	2	21	2
Judith Lewis	The Life of C.S.Lewis	14	0	15	2	29	2
	The Lord Peter Wimsey Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers	12	0	9	2	21	2
Hamish Cameron	John Knox	13	0	14	3	27	3
	The Life and Times of Thomas Paine	8	1	13	1	21	2
Ian Orriss	Karl Gustav Mannerheim	13	0	15	1	28	1
	Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II	10	0	11	0	21	0
Helen O’Connell	The History of Prague	12	2	18	2	30	2
	The Plant Hunters	11	0	14	0	25	0

I’m not going to go back through my comments in my preview. But if you want to check them out after you’ve read this review, you’ll see that once again, Mystic Meg I am not.

Dave Cowan started us off. It’s become traditional to look at the filmed insert lottery, and Dave seemed to have done pretty well. You’ve always got a chance of getting a good trip for your insert if you take Hollywood film stars in the final, and Dave was answering questions on The Marx Brothers’ films. Dave had one of the lower aggregate scores for specialist from his two appearances so far, and he really needed to find his best form to give himself the chance of being up with the leaders at the business end of the competition. Well, his 10 points were good, but even this early in the contest you couldn’t help feeling that this was just not going to be enough.

Now, having lived and worked in Wales for over 3 decades, there is no way that I am going to say that Ian Orriss was anything other than a winner getting to travel to some extremely picturesque and historic parts of the Principality, before his round on Owain Glyndwr and his Revolt. Which come to think of it sounds just a little bit like the name of an indie band. Sorry. Ian’s round of 14 points was probably his best specialist round of the whole series so far, and you have to say that this was the right time to produce it. Suddenly my prediction was looking like utter nonsense. Ian was going to be in the shake up.

So, it turned out, was Judith Lewis. Before we got to see her round, though, we saw her enjoying a trip to Bucharest. Again, that’s a fine trip – I do love Central/Eastern Europe myself. Judith was answering on The Fortunes of War series by Olivia Manning. I’m sorry to say that I have neither read any of the books, nor seen any of the TV adaptations starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. But I didn’t need to know the works themselves to recognise what a towering specialist performance it is to manage a full house of 15 correct answers from 15 questions in a Mastermind Grand Final. Superb work.

Then to Mark Grant. Mark stayed a lot closer to home for his film, being as he was answering questions on the theatres of Frank Matcham. As for the insert lottery, well, Mark was in the West End of London, and I’m sorry, I might not have lived in London for a very long time, but I still think of myself as a Londoner, and so there is no way that I have any intention of saying that Mark in any way drew the short straw. As for his round, Mark always prepares thoroughly, but just once or twice seemed strangely hesitant. Actually, I say strangely, but I’ll make a point here. John Humphrys has the very annoying habit of sometimes qualifying a correct answer, thus wasting valuable time for the contender. He did it no less than FOUR times in the first minute of Mark’s round – and in one of them he did so just to include the word -the. Did it make any difference? Who can say, but it can’t make it any easier to build up a head of steam. Mark scored 12. At 3 points behind he wasn’t exactly out of it, but he was faced with a huge task if he was to win.

Another contender who I felt had a very good chance coming into the final was Helen O’Connell. Without question Helen was a winner in the insert lottery, since she got to visit the Sequoia National Park in California. This was highly appropriate, since her specialist subject was United States National Parks. That was a good subject to pick for a final, since it must have guaranteed her a trip across the pond. Helen produced her best specialist round to date, as she scored 14 to place her level with Ian and just one point behind Judith. It was shaping up to be an exciting GK round.

Finally Hamish, and for his insert film he got to travel to a rather grey and murky Paris. Still a very beautiful city, though, whatever the weather. Bearing in mind that I knew that this was his last Mastermind performance I was sentimentally rooting for Hamish, and hoped that he’d rip his round to shreds and join Judith with a perfect set. Well, he didn’t quite manage that. He did score 13 though, and although he was 2 points behind he was still very much in it. Indeed, as the choc ices and kia ora were being passed around, it seemed as if only Dave was so far off the lead that he was out of the running.

Which makes his GK round all the more impressive. Let’s call a spade a spade. You might be lucky getting to the semi final of Mastermind, but lightning rarely strikes in the same place twice. Mugs don’t get to Mastermind Grand Finals. This may well have been just me, but I felt that the general standard of the GK rounds in the final were a little harder than the semis, and I thought that any score in the teens on these sets was doing well. Dave added a good 13 to his total to take the target to 23. It wasn’t likely to be a winning total, but it was enough to open the corridor of doubt.

It's easy for me to say this now, but I reckoned that Mark needed 15 to give himself a realistic shout. He certainly came close. However a couple of hesitancies, and a couple of questions like the Widdicombe Fair one just didn’t go his way. He built up some real momentum in the last part of the round, but in the end had scored 14 to take the target to 26. 26 was certainly enough to make it interesting, and would mean that any of the remaining contenders would require good scores to take the lead. It didn’t quite look out of reach, though.

In his filmed insert Hamish seemed very happy and satisfied to have reached two Mastermind finals, and rightly so. By just over the one minute mark in his GK round it seemed unlikely that he would be going home with the trophy. His tactic seemed to be to pass quickly and keep banging in the ones he knew, and this brought him a double figure score. It was 11, though, and left him on 24.

So to Ian. Ian needed 13 to take the lead, and after the first minute he was definitely on target. In fact his first minute was extremely impressive, as he snapped out answer after answer, eating up the distance between himself and Mark. Mark’s finishing burst, though, meant that Ian had to keep fighting right up to the blue line of death. When it had finished drawing its noose around the score, Ian had taken the 13 points he needed. Whatever happened in Helen’s and Judith’s rounds, it was a round worthy of winning.

Helen O’Connell produced two brilliant GK rounds in the heat and again in the semi final. In fact if she could replicate her score from the semi final, where she scored 14, then she would take the lead. Sadly for Helen, she had one of those rounds where the question just refuse to fall for you, and you’re fighting it all the way to the finish line. Helen scored 9 points, to finish with 23. Very bad luck, it is just one of those things you have to take on the chin, I’m afraid.

In the semis, Judith had the only single figure GK round of any of the finalists, and it was this which had caused me to rule out her chances of winning the title and the bowl in my preview. Well, she could not have chosen a more pressured situation, or a better time, to prove me wrong. Without seeming to be going especially quickly she kept racking up the answers, and seemed a shoe-in as her total reached 26 with time to spare. Then she started to stumble a little, then found an answer to take her to 27. She had passed just the once. As it stood, on the last question she could answer it wrong and win on pass countback. What she could not do was pass. To put it beyond all doubt, she answered correctly. John, seemingly overwhelmed by what she’d done, told Judith straightaway that she’d won with 28 points, and forgot to say that she’d passed once, or to announce what the correct answer had been.

Many, many congratulations, Judith. I’m sorry to you, and also to Ian, for down playing your chances in my preview. It just goes to show how little I know when you get right down to it. Congratulations to all the contenders for making it such a close, even nail biting end to the series.

Congratulations also to Mark Helsby and the team for another highly enjoyable series, and indeed, thanks to you for what you have done with the show over the last few years. I know it’s all change for the next series, and I hope that it will continue to be made as well as you and your team have done during your time at the helm.

The Details

Dave Cowan	The Films of the Marx Brothers	10	3	13	1	23	1
Ian Orriss	Owain Glyndwr and his Revolt	14	0	13	2	27	2
Judith Lewis	The Fortunes of War series by Olivia Manning	15	0	13	1	28	1
Mark Grant	The Theatres of Frank Matcham	12	0	14	0	26	0
Helen O’Connell	United States National Parks	14	0	9	1	23	1
Hamish Cameron	Mary Cassatt	13	1	11	4	24	5