Good evening, dearly beloved. I’m enjoying my half term holiday, thanks for asking. No overnight trips planned this time.
So, let’s get down to business, shall we? First up tonight,
well, first up tonight was Gill Woon. I know Gill through the wonders of the
internet, but even before I made her acquaintance this way, I knew that Gill
was runner up to Mary Elizabeth Raw in the 1989 Mastermind Grand Final. So,
bearing in mind Gill’s pedigree, I thought that she’d be my favourite for the
win tonight. Gill, I can only apologise for burdening you with the often fatal support
from the Clark sofa. Gill was answering on the Fauna of the Galapagos Islands,
and although Gill knew a hell of a lot more about the subject than I do, she
scored 5 with no passes. Sometimes the questions won’t fall for you, and when
that happens there’s not a lot you can do.
Next up was Nigel Booth, answering on The Mighty Boosh. Last
week I scored a couple of points on Buffy The Vampire Slayer despite never
having watched an episode, and this week I did the same with the Mighty Boosh. In
all honesty I don’t know how it was that I never got round to watching it, but
it’s just one of those things. There’s loads of shows that I only ever got into
several years after everybody else had and I suppose there’s a fair number
where I just missed the boat completely, this being one of them. Nigel
certainly didn’t miss the boat and scored a perfectly respectable 7.
Mark Eaden, our third to go, offered UEFA Champions League
Finals. I have a feeling that Shaun offered something very similar for one of
his subjects when he won in 2004. And it must be said that Mark put in the
specialist round of someone with serious designs upon at least this heat, if
not the whole series. His was clearly the specialist round of the night, and I’m
glad to say the 4 points I gained doubled my aggregate for the evening so far.
The last contender to go tonight, Eleanor Ayres, was taking
on Catherine de Medici for her specialist subject. Very well she did too, I
often fancy my chances on a round about a historical figure like this one, but
the only one I managed to answer was that her daughter in law was Mary ‘Hoots,
where’s ma heid gone?’ Queen of Scots.
All of which meant that Gill was first to return to the
chair. Now, sometimes you really get to see what someone is made of from the
way that they deal with adversity. I can’t say what happened in Gill’s
specialist, but I’ve definitely been in the position of finding the questions
just falling against you. In such a situation all you can do is just focus on
answering the next, and the next, and I think it’s fair to say that, following
the adversity of her specialist round, Gill showed herself to be a quizzer of
some substance in the way she dealt with her GK round. I felt that if she could
whack in a round of 15 or more she could still win. For the first minute, it
certainly looked as if she had every chance of doing so. Alas, in many of the
best GK rounds we’ve seen in this series, the contenders have had to negotiate
a bit of a slowing down in the middle of the round, and to be fair to Gill,
this she did. She kept going, and at the end of the round had scored 13 to take
her total to 18. Could it be enough? Well, possibly . . .
It would turn out, though, that all of the contenders in
tonight’s show were better than average when it came to GK. Nigel Booth needed
11 and no passes to equal Gill, and 12 and any number of passes to overhaul her
score. He certainly gave it a lash. This was not a case of a contender
tiptoeing gently through the corridor of doubt. No, he forged onwards, and you
could actually see the frustration of getting some of the answers wrong written
on his face. However a moment of weakness saw him pass, and the end of the
round arrived before the tape of the finishing line. Nigel scored double
figures, and that’s a good performance. But 10 gave him 17, and Gill was still
in the lead.
Eleanor Ayres was doing even better than Nigel did, though.
Again, this was another contender who did not seem at all daunted by the scale
of the task ahead of her. This is not to say that she answered everything
correctly. However she did answer a large proportion of her questions
correctly, and importantly she did it quickly and without passing. It sounds a
simple thing to say – answer what you know correctly, answer what you don’t know
quickly and don’t pass – but it really does take composure, concentration and
presence of mind to do it when you’re sitting in the chair. By the end Eleanor had
scored 12 and raised the target to 21 points.
This meant that Mark actually needed a double figure
performance in order to a least take the match to a tie break, and 11 to win
outright. At the risk of repeating myself, he did not seem daunted by the task,
and although I didn’t feel he was answering quite as quickly as Eleanor did, he
was knocking off the points needed, and he wasn’t passing. I somehow doubt that
he had a clue as to whether he’d got there or not when the round ended – I was
never able to keep count while I was in the chair – but I suspect he didn’t
know until Clive told him the score, and the fact that he’d fallen a mere 1
point short. It’s hard- I know, I’ve been there myself – but you have every
right to focus on the positive and how well you’ve done. That’s what I did at
the time.
So well done, Eleanor. I wish you good luck in the semis.
Well played to all 4 of our contenders tonight, another good show.
The Details
|
Gill Woon |
Fauna of the Galapagos Islands |
5 |
0 |
13 |
0 |
18 |
0 |
|
Nigel Booth |
The Mighty Boosh |
7 |
0 |
10 |
1 |
17 |
1 |
|
Mark Eaden |
UEFA Champions League Finals |
11 |
0 |
9 |
0 |
20 |
0 |
|
Eleanor Ayres |
Catherine de Medici |
9 |
0 |
12 |
0 |
21 |
0 |
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