Mastermind 2019 - Semi Final 5

Another Friday, another semi. Here’s the form guide:-

Janet Farley	REM	11	1	16	0	27	1
Ian Orriss	Karl Gustav Mannerheim	13	0	15	1	28	1
Allan Wright	Links golf courses of the UK and Ireland	13	0	17	2	30	2
Bekah Oliver	The films of Heath Ledger	13	2	11	5	24	7
Jo Skinner	The West Wing	11	3	16	3	27	3

One thing that definitely catches the eye is the scores on GK. 15 or over is a very good GK score for the first round, and so if we took these scores on face value we had every right to expect some quality in this semi final. Bekah Oliver, both on GK total and overall score looked to be very much the underdog. All of the other contenders had looked good in their heats – even Jo Skinner who had been narrowly beaten in her own heat, but reading back my own comments Allan Wright had particularly caught my eye.

Janet Farley kicked off the show, with a round on The Human Body. I reckon that this was a pretty good choice. I scored 8 of these purely based on the bits and pieces I’ve picked up over the years from General Knowledge quizzes, and it was by far my best round of the night. Putting it into perspective, Janet scored 11 in her specialist in the heat, while she scored 10 last night from a round which was 30 seconds shorter. Good performance.

Another contender whose chances I rated was Ian Orriss. Ian reached the semis in Jesse’s series, and was unlucky to be placed in the same semi as the great man himself, to whom he placed second. Ian was answering on the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and for much of the round I thought he would get a perfect score. He got one question wrong late on, but this still allowed him to get a double figure score, which would leave his fate very much in his own hand.

So to the pre-race favourite, Allan Wright. Allan was answering on Leicester City FC, which provided me with a further 4 points. Allan was our third contender in a row who’d obviously prepared his subject well, but just fell a little short of a great round. Allan scored 9, but being just one point behind going into the GK round is a pretty decent position to be in, if you can’t actually be in the lead, that is.

Could Bekah Oliver, our fourth contender, maintain the high standard which the other three contenders had set so far? Well, yes, she could. Answering on Helen Keller she too managed a double figure score, of 10 points. As compared with the previous three contenders, Bekah’s chosen tactic was to pass immediately on those questions to which she didn’t immediately know the answers, and this brought her 3 passes, the first we’d seen in this semi.

Jo Skinner’s specialist subject, the life and works of Frida Kahlo brought back happy memories for me. In my first round heat in the 2007/8 SOBM, one of my fellow contenders, Malcolm, also took the same subject. He did very well too – we both had 14 points, but he had no passes. Well, there was never going to be enough time in a current semi for anyone to get that many points in a semi, but Jo still did very well, 9 put her either joint second or joint last, depending on whether you’re a glass half full or a glass half empty sort of person, but she too was only one point off the lead.

So, well done to all 5 contenders, for learning their second subjects so well, and giving themselves every chance of the win.

First to return to the chair was Allan Wright. Allan had produced an absolutely barnstorming round of 17 on GK in his heat. This time he didn’t produce quite the same level of pyrotechnics. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, hs 10 points was good, and certainly enough to force the following contenders to pass through the corridor of doubt. Yet it didn’t quite look like enough to give him the chance of a win.

Jo Skinner had scored 16 on GK in her own heat, and so was by no means out of thing at this stage as she returned to the chair. As with Allan’s round, she scored 10, a perfectly respectable score which put her into the lead on pass countback. But again, it just didn’t quite look like a winning total. To put it into perspective, every semi so far this year has been won with a score higher than 20.

By the end of her own GK round, poor Janet Farley looked completely shell shocked. Her 16 on GK in the heats had been a fine demonstration of cool, calm quizzing and guessing. It’s easy to lose your head in a GK round if you’re not careful. Well, I’m not saying that this is what happened to Janet last night, but I think that she found the level of difficulty in a semi final GK round put her on the back foot pretty much from the start. By the end of the round she had raised her total to 15.

I thought that Ian Orriss would do it, but a stutter or two in the middle of his round were cause for a little doubt. He steadied himself, though, and powered through to a total of 11. This combined with the extra point he had scored in the SS round gave him a two point lead over Jo and Allan. In retrospect it was a show in which small margins were going to make a difference.

Finally Bekah Oliver. Bekah had scored 11 on GK in her heat. To put her task into perspective, she was going to have to repeat this score, having 30 seconds less in which to do it. Once again she adopted the tactic of passing quickly, but it didn’t really come off. By the end of the round she too had scored 15.

So, well played Ian – best of luck in the final.

The Details

Janet Farley	The Human Body	10	0	5	0	15	0
Ian Orriss	Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II	10	0	11	0	21	0
Allan Wright	Leicester City FC	9	0	10	4	19	4
Bekah Oliver	Helen Keller	10	3	5	7	15	10
Jo Skinner	The Life and Works of Frida Kahlo	9	2	10	1	19	1