Single letters matter

Hello, hello, and hello. How has your weekend been? I’ll confess, I wasn’t very well last week. Not covid, but ever since I had covid last year when I’ve had a cold or a bad chest I’ve found it’s been worse, and then when I’ve started to recover it’s taken a lot longer to shake it off. Mind you, I’m getting older too, so I suppose that it’s hardly that surprising. So, a lot of this weekend I’ve been doing sod all not a lot. However, as I’m sure you’re eager to know, I have reached the target of making 40 hand drawn Christmas cards.

So, I had a little time on my hands on Tuesday and Wednesday when I was too ill to go into work – stop that, it was genuine. I couldn’t breathe. I mean, I could breathe, but it was with difficulty and the simple effort of walking downstairs in the morning left me gasping for ages. Thankfully the latest edition of PASS landed in my inbox. In case you’re not yet a member of the Mastermind Club (and you have to have been a contender on the show to apply for membership) PASS is the Mastermind Club magazine. And very good it is too. Any member can contribute articles about anything they like. I’ve done so in the past, although it’s some time since the last time I got round to doing so. There was a fifty-year anniversary feel to some of the content this time, and former youngest Mastermind champion and all-round good egg Gavin Fuller contributed a feature in which he explained how the BBC had asked him for the fifty most difficult general knowledge questions to have been asked on the show. He was honest enough o admit that there can never be a definitive list and shared the fifty that he had culled from the Mastermind quiz books that have been issued over the years, and from editions of the shows.

I mean, it’s a hell of an undertaking when you think of it. Difficulty in terms of general knowledge questions can never be a completely objective concept. The best you can hope for is a list on which the majority agree to a greater or lesser extent. Yes, I did think that many of the fifty that Gavin shared with us were pretty difficult, but then as many people have said over the years, they’re all difficult if you don’t know the answer, and all easy if you do.

Of course, sometimes relatively easy questions are made harder because of circumstances beyond your control. For example, last Thursday the very first question of the quiz asked words to the effect of – which British pop singer died on 18^th December 2000 in a car crash in Mexico? – Well, the year and Mexico suggested Kirsty MacColl to me, Yet I also knew that she never died in a car crash, but in a tragic accident involving a powerboat, saving her son’s life in the process as I recall. Not having another plausible answer and bearing in mind that question masters do make mistakes sometimes, we put Kirsty MacColl down as the answer. Which turned out to be the answer that the question master wanted.

I am very proud that I didn’t shout at the question master to put him right. There were another couple of occasions in the same quiz where I could have done as well but didn’t. I can only put this down to the good example set by my daughter Jess, my son-in-law Dan and our friend Adam, keeping me on the straight and narrow. I know that Jessie particularly doesn’t like it.

Still, when I got home, I did think that I’d better google it for my own satisfaction. I was right, but all that did was make me wonder how it was that the question master came to make such a mistake. I think I’ve worked it out. Kirsty MacColl and her family were diving at the time. So my guess is that the question master misread his source when putting the questions together and read it as a dRiving accident. Maybe.

Going back to the 90s and the early noughties there was a wrong’un which did the rounds for a few years. It went something like this – in which opera were the tragic lovers burned alive? – This goes back to the dear old Pears Quiz Companion, my first ever quiz ‘bible’ – which said that the lovers in Aida were burned alive. Of course, they weren’t – they were buried alive. I know all about this one because I asked it myself. Only the once, mind you, and then the mistake was pointed out to me. So, whenever I heard that again, I knew where the error had come from.