Mastermind 2023: First Round Heat 7

Not happy. All it would have taken would have been for the Beeb to start tonight’s Mastermind a mere fifteen minutes earlier and I would have been able to watch both this and Bakeoff without having to record either. Well, there it is. Let’s make the best of it.

Recidivists have thus far been pretty thin on the ground up until tonight. First up though was a great Mastermind stalwart Mel Kinsey. I believe that this may well be the 6^th series that Mel has contested. His history with the show stretches back to 1995 when he made the Grand Final and was unlucky to be in the same one as the great Kevin Ashman. Mel was offering us the life of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. Sadly for Mel it turned out to be one of those rounds. Sometimes the questions stubbornly refuse to go your way, and answers refuse to jump off the tip of your tongue. Mel scored 5.

Second into the chair was teacher Jenny Armitage. Yes, she did have to put up with at least some of the support from the Clark sofa. I always want to see my brothers and sisters in adversity teaching do well. Answering on Shakespeare Comedies that’s exactly what she did. I’d be tempted to say that Shakespeare comedies is an oxymoron, but that’s really unfair. Shakespeare can seem very dry and unappetising on the page, but you see a really good performance of even the less popular of his comedies and they come alive. Mind you, it’s a long time since I saw any of them being performed, which is my excuse for a less than stellar performance. I didn’t get anywhere near the 10 that Jenny scored.

Next up was Darren Ross, answering on the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. I approached this round with a well founded sense of foreboding, and in the end I was lucky to get zero with my lack of knowledge. Going off on a tangent my favourite ‘fact’ about the ’45 is that Bonnie Prince Charlie was the most famous man in History to have been named after three sheepdogs – thanks Billy Connolly. I’ll be honest, I didn’t think that there was any low hanging fruit in this round, and Darren rarely looked to be having any difficulty at all in recalling the answers to almost all of the questions. His 11 on what certainly looked like a very difficult round looked to me to be a great performance.

If there was no hint of a piece of low hanging fruit in the previous rounds, then it was equally true of the fourth. Gaynor Melling was answering on Rupert Bear. Now I knew that the character was originated by Mary Tourtel, but that made part of a question and not an answer. I also knew that Alfred Betsall took over when Mary Tourtel had finished, and again, that was part of a question. These were enough o tell me that for the second round in a row I would not be troubling the scorer. Gaynor plugged on throughout the round, eventually managing to post a score of 9.

So to the General Knowledge. The big question going through my mind was whether the specialist round was going to be playing on Mel’s mind. For the first minute or so it certainly seemed so. But as I mentioned, Mel is an old hand at this game, and I was glad to see him rally significantly in the last minute and a half. In the end Mel scored 9 on General Knowledge.

This brought Gaynor Melling back to the chair. With only 2 points separating the players in bronze, silver and gold at the halfway stage, the three of them each had everything to play for in the GK round. Gaynor took the tried and trusted method of listening to each question and answering what she knew, and guessing what she didn’t. True, she did accrue two passes on the way to scoring 9, and with everything being so tight at the top, I couldn’t help wondering whether these might prove to be significant.

Well, it never quite looked as if Jenny was going to score the 8 she would need to bring the pass countback into play. She started quite well, but as the round went on the correct answers dried up. In the end it was a little closer than it looked as if it might be, but she fell one short scoring 7 to take her own total to 17.

It was down to Darren Ross, then. If he could score a relatively modest 7 and no more than 1 pass, then he would secure an outright win. Well, to be honest he did make quite hard work of it, and it was only in the last couple of questions that he crept past the total. In the end he added 8 to his score to take his final total to 19. No, that’s not a great score, but it was enough, and that’s what really matters.  Some nights that’s just how it works out, and if you’re standing on top of the podium at the end of the ace, well, the time you posted is of secondary importance. Well done, sir.

The Details

Mel Kinsey	Neil Armstrong	5	0	9	3	14	3
Jenny Armitage	Shakespeare Comedies	10	1	7	3	17	4
Darren Ross	The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745	11	0	8	1	19	1
Gaynor Melling	Rupert Bear	9	0	9	2	18	2