Well, as you may have read, I have
given a cautious thumbs up to the 2019 makeover of Mastermind. Last week’s
first heat certainly benefitted from having 4 contenders capable of giving a
good account of themselves in the GK round, who had thoroughly prepared their
specialist rounds. How would the new look show fair with a slightly less strong
line up of contenders, though?
First to throw her metaphorical hat
into the metaphorical ring was Adrienne Holt. She was answering on Charles Dickens’
female characters. That’s quite an undertaking. Even if you only include the
novels, there’s still a hell of a lot of them. In recent years there have been
times when , in a wide ranging subject such as this, the vast majority of
questions asked have been the kind where a decent knowledge of the subject has
been enough to answer most of them, thus giving the contender and easier ride
than others. In this round, though, I would say that the 7 that I managed was
the most you would have got this way without thorough preparation, eg – what was
Little Dorrit’s Christian name - and that’s the way it should be. Adrienne
managed 8, although it would have been 9 I think if the buzzer hadn’t robbed
her of concentration on the last question.
Hasit Raja offered us the Mughal Empire.
Now, I don’t honestly know enough abou the subject to say that these were a mix
of easier and harder questions like the previous round, although I did manage 3
of my own. Still, bearing in mind the length of the questions that are asked
nowadays anything in double figures is a good performance, and Hasit’s 10
certainly looked like this. I was pleased to have dragged up the name Fatepur
Sikri from somewhere in the recesses of memory.
Emily Lawrence offered us a near
perfect round on Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, another subject where I struggled
to add more than a couple of points to my aggregate total. She scored 12 and no
passes, which puts her joint highest on specialist for this series. More about
that in a moment.
Our final contender, Lewis Barn, has
not been this way before, but is no stranger to our screens, having been a
member of the Glasgow University team that reached the quarter finals of the
last series of University Challenge. The path from UC to Mastermind seems to be
a path becoming increasingly well-trodden, and that’s all to the good to my way
of thinking. Lewis was answering on the original Twilight Zone series, and this
gave me my second highest round of the evening. Not as high as Lewis’ though –
he only failed to get a perfect round on the last question, thus joining the
ranks of 12 and no passes. No fewer than 6 out of the 8 general knowledge
rounds in this series so far have ended on this score. As for me, well, I don’t
wish to talk about my aggregate SS score for the last show, but this set the
bar at 16 for this season so far.
Last week, each contender raised the
target with their rounds on GK, and a similar thing happened on last night’s
show. Both Adrienne Holt and Hasit Raja scored respectable 8s on their own
rounds, despite using very different tactics. Adrienne was trying to answer
everything, which resulted in a couple of long pauses, and even then she still
passed a couple of times. Hasit, by contrast, wasted no time hesitating, but it
did mean he was perhaps a little trigger happy with the passes, incurring 5 by
the end of the round.
At this point my money was on Lewis,
Emily being very much an unknown quantity in terms of GK. She did manage to hit
double figures, scoring 10 and 1 pass, which I reckoned should be enough to put
Lewis into the corridor of doubt. Indeed, it was a pretty close run thing.
Lewis only scored his 11th point on the very last question which
gave him an outright win. However, he would have won anyway even if he’d
answered it incorrectly, since he didn’t incur any passes. Well done, and best
of luck to you in the semi finals.
So a second week, and while we didn’t
see any of the same pyrotechnics which we saw in Emma Laslett’s round, I still
enjoyed this. Keep up the good work.
The Details
|
Adrienne Holt
|
Charles Dickens’ Female Characters
|
8
|
1
|
8
|
2
|
16
|
3
|
|
Hasit Raja
|
The Mughal Empire
|
10
|
1
|
8
|
5
|
18
|
6
|
|
Emily Lawrence
|
The Life and Legacy of Elizabeth
Garrett Anderson
|
12
|
0
|
10
|
1
|
22
|
1
|
|
Lewis Barn
|
Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone”
|
12
|
0
|
11
|
0
|
23
|
0
|
1 comment:
The demise of the 2018 innovations seems to have met with general approval. However, I thought, at least part of it, was an attempt to make it difficult for competitors to avoid passing by giving wrong answers and as such, I think it was largely successful. If you don't know how many passes everyone else has, avoiding passing may just be wasting time.
I did attempt to write an article on this subject (titled "To Pass or not to Pass, that is the question") a few years ago. You may have gathered that I am strongly of the view that giving answers that you know to be wrong, in order to avoid a pass, is not in the spirit of Mastermind, whatever that means.
Out of courtesy, I submitted it to the producer of the show, who confirmed that there is still a rule whereby an answer not deemed to be a genuine attempt to answer can still be regarded as a pass, although I am not sure when that was last used. Maybe it takes place off screen and is just added to the number of passes but it has never happened when I was there. Has anyone else experienced this?
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