"Why do they apply?" asked a colleague.

Well, this is a nice position to be in. It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve just finished compiling Thursday evening’s quiz for the rugby club. I also set myself the target of having made 10 hand drawn Christmas cards by the end of the weekend, and I’ve just drawn the 11^th. I usually make them in November, so that I have time to make more if I suddenly find I need them.

So this morning I’d like to reflect on a conversation I had with another member of staff at work during the week just gone. I don’t often find myself talking about quiz shows in general or Mastermind in particular at work because the subject just doesn’t tend to come up very often. But on Wednesday a colleague mentioned that she’d watched last week’s Mastermind and she passed comment upon a couple of the low scores on that particular show. One of the contenders had a low score on Specialist and another one had a low score on General Knowledge. Her point was that she didn’t understand why anyone would apply to go on the show if they weren’t prepared to learn their specialist subject or they didn’t have much general knowledge.

Can open. Worms all over the floor.

I could have just left it, made some sort of non-committal response and walked away. But, being the way that I am, I couldn’t really do that. So I pointed out that the two rounds are actually pretty different, and the range of reasons why you might not do very well in one are not necessarily applicable to the other. Then I explained my view that not learning your subject is only one reason why you might have a low score on specialist. As I see it these are others. Apologies that this may well be old ground to regular readers. I will try to be a bit succinct :-

·       A mismatch between the contender’s understanding of the parameters of the subject and the question setter’s. For example, in the last couple of series there’s been little or no point in learning huge swathes of facts about production details of TV series when the questions have largely concentrated on events of the shows. So let’s say that the setters suddenly went back to focusing several of the questions on production details. You’d be stuffed if you had only learned events, however hard you worked on them.

·       The ‘black chair’ effect. I was lucky. For most of the time I was in the chair I was able to keep my head, despite one shaky moment in Champ of Champs. But you cannot know how you are going to react until you do it. By which time it is too late. Just one wrong answer can send your mind into a tailspin. However hard you’ve worked on your subject.

·       You can work really hard on learning your subject. You can put hours and hours into it. However this doesn’t actually mean that it is going to result in a good score – not unless you have really thought carefully about HOW you are going to learn for your subject and HOW you are going to do so in a way which helps you sharpen the way that you recall and respond as quickly as you can.

As regards General Knowledge, well, that’s a bit different. The great triple champion (Mastermind 2006, Brain of Britain and Counterpoint) Geoff Thomas said that you can revise and learn for General Knowledge. He’s right, of course. However I would contend that you can’t really do it effectively over a matter of a few short weeks when you’re trying to learn a specialist subject at the same time. You either need to have at least a decent general knowledge before you apply, or should spend a year working on it before you apply.

So why do people who don’t have a good general knowledge apply to the show then? Well, first of all, I don’t think that people who have a low score in a General Knowledge round do naturally have a poor general knowledge. It doesn’t automatically follow.

Let me give you an example. In the 2022 series, Sirin Kamalvand scored four in her GK round in heat 22. A few days later she had an excellent article about her appearance published in the Guardian. In the very first paragraph she explained that she thought she was good at quizzes and was a ruthless team captain whose team nearly always took first prize in their local quiz. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if many people who’ve had disappointing scores in GK could tell a similar story. Why should they rule themselves out of applying for the show when they DON’T have a weak general knowledge? Yes, just because you regularly win your local pub quiz it doesn’t mean that you’re going to become a Mastermind champion, but it’s decent grounds for thinking you’ll be able to give the GK round a go.

Conversely, if you really do have a weak general knowledge, well how would you know that? If you didn’t regularly play in quizzes, and if you didn’t regularly play along at home with quiz shows, how would you know? Quite possibly because you know all you need to know for your general life, you might well believe that your GK is perfectly adequate, because in most situations relevant to your own life, it is. (Such people do sometimes get on these shows. My friend Rob Merrill who was a runner up to Ray Ward in Brain of Britain explained how, in his first round heat, he was consoling one of his runners up. She had scored poorly, and was close to tears. It turned out that she didn’t normally listen to the show or watch any quiz shows on TV. Her daughter had made the application for her and she’d thought she had an adequate General Knowledge and that it might be fun.)

Certainly in the Original Series up to 1997 applicants to be contenders had to do well enough in a General Knowledge test in their audition. I’m sure it was the same for Radio Four Mastermind, and wouldn’t be surprised if it worked that way with Discovery Mastermind too. I know for a fact that it was part of the auditions for Mastermind: The Next Generation from 2003 up to my time, and doubtless afterwards, probably up to the present time, unless anyone can tell me different. Now I’ve heard conflicting stories about where the threshold was set, or how many points you needed out of 20, but it does at least show that there has always been a commitment to saving contenders who will really struggle with general knowledge from themselves. Yeah, okay, I know I had an issue with the last year or two that it was produced in house by the BBC, where it seemed to me that too many low scoring GK contenders were getting through to the show. What can I say? This was genuinely how I felt at the time, and I was on the slide into depression, or actually in it at the time.

So, if the contenders on the show or at least the vast majority of them do have a claim to having at least a pretty decent general knowledge, why do some of them end up with low scores? Well, this is by no means an exhaustive list of reasons, just what I think. In no particular order:-

·       It’s just not your night. General knowledge is by definition extremely wide. No one knows everything. There may be only 12 questions asked in all four GK rounds that you don’t know the answer to, but if they’re all asked in YOUR round, then you’re sunk. Not your night.

·       The black chair effect. Especially if things didn’t go your way in the specialist round and that’s still playing on your mind.

·       Extraneous factors. For example, you’re under the weather, with an illness coming on.

So, this is how I summed it all up to my colleague. You know what? It is possible that some people don’t learn their subject. I think it’s a very silly approach and not really playing fair by the show or the audience, but maybe some people don’t. Maybe some people do apply knowing that they don’t have a very good general knowledge, and maybe some of these slip through the net onto the show. But this is by no means the only explanation and I reckon in many cases it isn’t the correct one. So let’s not be too harsh or critical about it.