Mastermind 2022: First Round: Heat 17

Hello and a very Happy New Year to you, Dearly Beloved. Sadly this year’s New Year quiz in the rugby club, scheduled for Thursday, has been postponed due to the number of staff who have contracted Covid in the last few days – a sign of the times, I‘m afraid. So you can imagine that the return of quizzy Mondays was very welcome here in LAM Towers.

The first contender to be broadcast in 2022 was Bryan Dunlop. Bryan was answering on The Gurkhas. This is not a subject about which I could ever claim to have much knowledge – about 4 questions’ worth as it turned out, which rather surprised me. That was very welcome, especially considering that I didn’t trouble the scorers in the remaining three SS rounds. Bryan answered well, confidently and quickly, and the score of 11 that he finished with certainly looked as if it would give him a shout.

Sadly the same could not really be said for Charlie Bonham’s round on Fernando Torres. Now, there have been hardly any specialist rounds in the current series where I’ve found myself murmuring – you really haven’t learned your subject properly, have you? - I certainly didn’t murmur anything of the sort during Charlie’s round. She clearly knew her stuff, but the round just didn’t quite come off – not quite. In this day and age 7 is a perfectly respectable score. However, 4 points behind at half time is a significant deficit to have to make up. There were also two contenders still to go, who could conceivably push that target further out of reach.

Speaking as someone who studied English Literature at University in the 80s, who would rather teach poetry than any other aspect of English, and who reads ‘serious’ poetry for pleasure, I’m perfectly happy to say that I do actually really enjoy Pam Ayres’ work. Of course, I’ve already admitted that I didn’t score a single point on Lisa von Fircks’ round on Pam and her oeuvre, but that’s just the way it went. Here’s a funny thing. Lisa scored only 1 point more than Charlie had scored, and yet after Lisa’s round I thought – ‘Good round, job well done’. So, is that maybe where the line between respectable and good can be drawn?

Well, whatever the answer is to that question, there’s no doubt about how we can rate Anthony Fish’s round on The 1950s films of Alfred Hitchcock. 14 from 14 – that’s a perfect round. I do have an observation to make on the round. This is no reflection on Anthony – his performance was brilliant, and nothing can be taken away from it. I did think though, as a set of questions on films this was a strange set. I’ll try to explain. Of all the 14 questions asked, 1 was about the writer of “Dial M For Murder”. All 13 of the rest were about details from the films. There were no other questions dealing with the production, or the actors, or anything else. Compared with film rounds we’ve seen in the past, these were all rather samey. Not that this bothered Anthony. He had prepared so well that I reckon you could have asked him questions about the films for the whole 30 minutes and he would have had them all right. Superb performance.

So to the GK. Charlie returned first to the chair, and she gave it a lash, and made a decent fist of the first part of her round. Sadly it all became rather hard going after that, and she finished the round with a total of 12 points.

In order to go into the lead, Lisa needed 7 points to take her to 15. So when she arrived there, it was a question of whether she could add enough points to that to place the two remaining contenders within the corridor of doubt. Well, she added a further 3 to this to finish with 18, which didn’t look like it was going to be enough. On the other hand though it did take her to a total of 10 on GK, and that’s a good performance.

Not as good, it must be said, as Bryan Dunlop’s. Bryan smoothly knocked off the  points needed to pass Anthony’s score, added another 4 to go past the target, and then took his score for the round up to 11, to raise the bar to 22. In layman’s terms this meant that Anthony was going to need 8 and no more than 1 pass to win. A huge target? No. Yet definitely enough to create that little bit of doubt.

In the end, though, all it did was to spur Anthony to produce the best GK round that we’ve seen this series. Scores in the high 20s have been rare in this series, and this is the first 30 pointer that we’ve seen this season. In the present day and age, 30 points in Mastermind is a monster total, and Clive himself called it colossal. I don’t recall ever meeting Anthony, and I don’t think that the show ever mentioned where he calls home. So maybe it was just my imagination that he seemed to have a Welsh accent. I’m pretty sure that I’m the last winner based in Wales. Anthony, if I’m right about his accent, could just be the person to take that honour from me.

Whatever the case, this was a magnificent performance, and I wish you every success in the semi-finals. You, sir, are one to watch.

The Details

Bryan Dunlop	The Gurkhas	11	0	11	2	22	2
Charlie Bonham	Fernando Torres	7	0	5	2	12	2
Lisa von Fircks	The Life and Works of Pam Ayres	8	1	10	4	18	5
Anthony Fish	Alfred Hitchcock films of the 1950s	14	0	16	0	30	0